# Episode 109: Unpacking the Nuances of Deep Seek with Austin Lyons

- Show: [The Circuit](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/the-circuit)
- Published: 2025-03-16
- Length: 48m
- Episode: 110
- Page: https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/the-circuit/2025-03-16-episode-109-unpacking-the-nuances-of-deep-seek-with-austin-lyons
- Listen: https://share.transistor.fm/s/4f87fb77

## Summary

Austin Lyons, founder of ChipStrat, joins Jay Goldberg to analyze Deep Seek, a self-funded AI lab from China that emerged from the quantitative hedge fund High Flyer. They discuss Deep Seek's technical innovations, including its efficient Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture and the R1 reasoning model, which demonstrated that high-performance AI is possible despite US chip export controls limiting access to NVIDIA H100s. The conversation explores how Deep Seek's training efficiency and open-weight models have shifted the industry focus from pure pre-training scaling to inference optimization and post-training techniques.

## Chapters

- [0:06](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/the-circuit/2025-03-16-episode-109-unpacking-the-nuances-of-deep-seek-with-austin-lyons#t=6) Introduction and Deep Seek Origins
- [4:12](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/the-circuit/2025-03-16-episode-109-unpacking-the-nuances-of-deep-seek-with-austin-lyons#t=252) Deep Seek Model Architecture: V-Series and R1
- [11:07](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/the-circuit/2025-03-16-episode-109-unpacking-the-nuances-of-deep-seek-with-austin-lyons#t=667) Mixture of Experts and Hardware Constraints
- [20:21](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/the-circuit/2025-03-16-episode-109-unpacking-the-nuances-of-deep-seek-with-austin-lyons#t=1221) AI Scaling Laws: Pre-training vs. Inference
- [26:03](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/the-circuit/2025-03-16-episode-109-unpacking-the-nuances-of-deep-seek-with-austin-lyons#t=1563) Training Efficiency and Economic Impact
- [35:21](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/the-circuit/2025-03-16-episode-109-unpacking-the-nuances-of-deep-seek-with-austin-lyons#t=2121) CUDA Optimization and Hardware Recommendations
- [42:51](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/the-circuit/2025-03-16-episode-109-unpacking-the-nuances-of-deep-seek-with-austin-lyons#t=2571) Deep Seek's Market Position and Future

## Topics

- [AI & machine learning](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/topic/ai-and-machine-learning)
- [Chips, FPGAs & semiconductors](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/topic/chips-and-fpgas)
- [Policy, trade & tariffs](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/topic/policy-trade-and-tariffs)

## Most relevant to

large enterprises

## Mentioned

- Deep Seek (company)
- High Flyer (company)
- NVIDIA (company)
- H100 (chip)
- H800 (chip)
- OpenAI (company)
- ChatGPT (product)
- Llama (product)
- Mixtral (product)
- ChipStrat (company)
- Meta (company)
- Google (company)
- Anthropic (company)
- Gemini (product)
- Copilot (product)

## Related episodes from other shows

- [AI Disruption: DeepSeek and Cerebras](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/oxide-and-friends/2025-02-06-ai-disruption-deepseek-and-cerebras) (Oxide and Friends)
- [CEO Interview: Flex Logix’ Geoff Tate on AI | Open Source Hits Hardware](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/ee-times-current/2021-02-05-ceo-interview-flex-logix-geoff-tate-on-ai-open-source-hits-hardware) (EE Times Current)
- [Ep 306: Bambu Hacks, AI Strikes Back, John Deere Gets Sued, and All About Capacitors](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/hackaday-podcast/2025-01-31-ep-306-bambu-hacks-ai-strikes-back-john-deere-gets-sued-and-all-about-capacitors) (Hackaday Podcast)
- [CTO Interview: Kunle Olukotun of SambaNova](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/ee-times-current/2021-10-29-cto-interview-kunle-olukotun-of-sambanova) (EE Times Current)
- [Google CRUSHES Everyone + Elon's $10B Anime Crisis + The Age of Agents](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/built-2-scale/2025-08-29-google-crushes-everyone-elons-10b-anime-crisis-the-age-of-agents) (Built 2 Scale)

## Citing this page

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