Nature Deepseek Article may be Exaggerated

The 17 September 2025 Nature cover story was this article by China AI company Deepseek. Supposedly it had a hot new AI model trained at low cost.

They aRe widely accused of using pirated Nvidia chips that were illegally imported.

Now Anthropic claims that Deepseek and other China AI companies have been using thousands of bogus accounts to steal data from Anthropic models.

Deepseek has made some decent AI LLMs, but maybe not the scientific advance they claimed. Nature said that it investigated the validity of the Deepseek claims, but I don't know how it could know what was going on in China.

Anthropic could be lying. It really hates Chinese competition. So I am not necessarily drawing any conclusions here.

Why Chance make no sense in Many-Worlds

I have argued here that many-world (Everettian) theory is incoherent because it fails to make any sense out of probability. To believe in the theory, you have to reject probability as widely understood, and then to reject all of science.

No one admits this, of course, but see how a new paper dances around the subject.

Everettian chance in no uncertain terms

The current landscape of views on chance in Everettian quantum mechanics is a curious one. On the one side, longstanding critics of many-worlds theories maintain that probability is needed to make sense of the machinery that Everettians use to derive chance values, resulting in circularity (Baker 2007, Dawid and Thébault 2015, Mandolesi 2019). On the other side, Everettians seem to agree that chance values should be derived in terms of agents’ uncertain or partial beliefs—but they cannot agree on how.1

Perhaps the most famous of these uncertainty-based approaches is the decision-theoretic program explored by Deutsch (1999) and Wallace (2012): they purport to prove that a rational Everettian agent must order their preferences over acts in a way that recovers the Born rule. Sebens and Carroll (2018) take issue with one of the principles of rationality in Wallace’s approach and instead aim to derive Everettian probabilities from principles governing self-locating uncertainty. McQueen and Vaidman (2019) offer yet another self- locating uncertainty approach, taking issue with Sebens and Carroll’s metaphysical view of branching. Notably, all three approaches claim that symmetries of quantum states are central to their arguments, but none attempt to characterize the symmetries at play.2

The most common defense of many-worlds here is to give up on probabilities directly, but to argue that it could be rational to believe in them anywy, as some sort of subjective way of trying to make sense out of nonsense.

Any sort of scientific outlook requires saying that some things happen, some do not happen, and some things are more likely than others. Many-worlds is unable to deal with any of this. Just look at the above nonsense. It essentially says that many-worlds researchers are trying to make sense out of chance, and not succeeding.

Cannot make Decisions without Free Will

Dr. Bee rants about Why I fear for the future of mankind:

0:24 You all know that I don’t believe in free will, which is why I don’t talk about what we “should” do. I’m just here to observe what we do. And this doesn’t look good for the future of our species. ...

6:13 This is why I am of two minds about the current developments. On the one hand, I see a return to sanity, a recognition on a country level about what we can realistically expect and achieve. And this will probably mean that more climate policies will be rolled back in the coming years. It’s not great, but we will cope.

On the other hand, it demonstrates that we have a much bigger underlying problem, our inability to make collectively intelligent decisions. That will come back to haunt us and that’s why I’m worried about the future of our species.

She rejects free will because of a belief in superdeterminism. That is a fallacy that I have criticize previously.

Here, I am just wondering how she thinks that anyone will make intelligent decisions, if there is no free will. Free will is the ability to make decisions. No free will, and we are trapped in the consequences of some ancient initial value problem.

Most philosophers have become compatibilists, meaning that you can have the illusion of free will, even though all your decisions are determined. Whether that is true or not, if our decisions are determined, there is no use complaining about lousy decisions. No one can make any decisions. We are doomed to live out a preprogrammed life.

Once she says that she has no free will, why would anyone listen to her opinions? They are not her opinions. They are just sentences that have been programmed to come out of her mouth. She is not applying her personal knowledge and judgment. She cannot expect us to draw our own conclusions. It is all like a big artificial simulation. She is like a movie character who says she is worried about the future. It means nothing. It is just a line in the script.

Update: Here is evolutionist Jerry Coyne on a rant against free will, attacking Michael Shermer for saying:

Determinists like Harris and Sapolsky have physics envy. The history of science is littered with the failed pipe dreams of ever-alluring reductionist schemes to explain the inner workings of the mind

Coyne is a hard-core determinist. He does say that we can learn from experience, but it is involuntary evolution at work.

Quantum Computers will be Useless, even if they work

Dr. Bee's latest video:

As we continue to research quantum computing, quantum advantage – the supposed advantage that quantum computers theoretically have over regular computers – continues to dry up. Today we’re covering how more quantum computing use cases are disappearing, and an unexpected problem with quantum computing in general.

I have been arguing that quantum computers are impossible, and also that they will have no commercial utility, even if they do work.

In this video, Hossenfelder argues that quantum computers have made a lot of technical progress, such as on error correction. But they are too expensive, too slow, too power-hungry, and no one can find any useful applications.

On the Physical Effect of Potentials

Veritasium has a new video on the Aharonov–Bohm effect.

The object is to show that, in a non-simply-connected spacetime, a physical effect can depend on the potentials, and not just the fields.

Mathematically, the field is the curvature of a differential geometry connection, and a connection is the infinitesimal relation between nearby points. The physics depends on the connection, and not just the curvature.

This is portrayed as a great paradox, with physicists being split on how to explain it. Some resort to nonlocal nonsense.

Bohm himself was a Communist, as the video explains, and he had weird beliefs.

There are indeed a lot of papers on this subject, but it is all long-settled. Eg, see this paper claiming Impossibility of Gauge-Invariant Explanations of the Aharonov–Bohm Effect. I do not get what this paper is saying, as all the observables are gauge-invariant.

Lenny Susskind's AI impostor explains it somewhat in this video. These AI videos are amazingly good. I wonder what the real Susskind thinks about fake videos being better that his real lectures.

The point here is that curvature is a measure of something being curved. It should not be surprising or paradoxical that the something has physical significance.

The argument is given that the potential cannot be real, if two different potentials give the same fields.

The examples are not really two different potentials. The two potentials correspond to the same connection. The connection is what is real.

Besides, there are lots of physical variables that depend on choices. Measuring height depends on choice of coordinates. Measuring momentum depends on a reference frame. Wave functions depend on a choice of phase factor.

No Truth in a Causal Universe

This guy argues that we should not accept any arguments from people who believe in determinism, and reject free will.

I agree with this. If a schizophrenic tells you that he obeys the voices in his head, then you would not accept his testimony on any subject. He is not even speaking for himself.

Sam Harris is one of those determinists. Physicist Brian Keating interviewed Harris, and trashes him in this video. Keating says Harris is a secular fundamentalist, has Trump (and Musk) derangement syndrome, lacks self-awareness, and has poorly thought out Bible criticisms.

One of the main arguments is that Harris says that anyone could write a better book than the Bible, because the Bible condones slavery. Keating says that the same word was used for slaves and servants, and the Bible says they must be treated well.

I agree that criticizing the Bible because it has slavery is lazy. Everyone had slavery. Better economic systems had not been invented.

Harris appears to have lost his grip on reality by taking illegal psychodelic drugs. He says he does not even have a feeling of free will.

Here is a new video with Harris and Penrose, on consciousness.

Physicists Defend Free Will

The issue of free will is mostly a philosophical one, with the main arguments being understood by the ancient Greeks.

In the last century, most intellectuals have turned against free will. They all accept some variation of the following argument.

(1) The fundamental laws of physics are deterministic. The whole concept of a rational outlook towards the world requires determinism. Maybe there is some randomness coming from quantum mechanics, but then the laws are determinism-plus-randomness such that the randomness does not matter for free will.

(2) Free will is just an illusion. All our actions are determined. It may be helpful to imagine that you are making choices, and such imagining might be good for society and your peace of mind, but free will is how you rationalize being a pre-programmed robot.

For a recent example, see this video discussion:

Robert Sapolsky, Paul Bloom, and Lucy Allais debate whether free will exists and the deterministic nature of our lives.

Can we escape our destiny?

An individual "is responsible for everything he does," claimed Sartre. And from criminal justice to creative expression, free will and responsibility are central to our culture and our personal lives. Yet neuroscientists and materialist thinkers commonly maintain that freedom is an illusion. And it remains unknown how the core principles of freedom and responsibility can be reconciled with this outlook. Many attempts have been made to argue that the two seemingly contradictory frameworks can be made compatible. But critics say these "compatibilist" arguments are unconvincing and are driven merely by the attempt to make scientific materialism acceptable. Furthermore, whilst surveys suggest most materialist philosophers believe we can reconcile the two, the majority of us reject the idea that an action can be both determined and free. ...

Joining us from California is Robert Sapolsky. Sapolsky is a distinguished neuroscientist, primatologist, and author, best known for his research on stress and its impact on behaviour and health. He is also a professor at Stanford University.

Sapolsky confidently tells us that science proved an essential determinism, and that it is nonsense to say that we make any choices. He says a lot of other things that are completely false.

I have argued against this view many times, and now I find a new paper explaining it well:

Reframing the Free Will Debate: The Universe is Not Deterministic

Henry D. Potter, George F.R. Ellis, Kevin J. Mitchell

Free will discourse is primarily centred around the thesis of determinism. Much of the literature takes determinism as its starting premise, assuming it true for the sake of discussion, and then proceeds to present arguments for why, if determinism is true, free will would be either possible or impossible. This is reflected in the theoretical terrain of the debate, with the primary distinction currently being between compatibilists and incompatibilists and not, as one might expect, between free will realists and skeptics. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we argue that there is no reason to accept such a framing. We show that, on the basis of modern physics, there is no good evidence that physical determinism of any variety provides an accurate description of our universe and lots of evidence against such a view. Moreover, we show that this analysis extends equally to the sort of indeterministic worldviews endorsed by many libertarian philosophers and their skeptics, a worldview which we refer to as determinism plus randomness. The papers secondary aim is therefore to present an alternative conception of indeterminism, which is more in line with the empirical evidence from physics. It is this indeterministic worldview, we suggest, that ought to be the central focus of a reframed philosophy of free will.

I wonder if I am being duped by AI slop. Maybe some AI put together these podcasts based on Susskind's lectures and writings. Here is Roger Penrose on Quantum Mechanics Is NOT Random. It is a very good summary of Penrose's view on the subject, and rendered in his own voice. In the end, he argues that humans have free will, based ib quantum gravity collapse, and that AI will never be conscious.