DeepSeek author discusses the impact of AI, stating that talent may be buried in yesterday

DeepSeek operator engineer Liu Sheng discusses the impact of AI on his work. He states that the main Attention operator of DeepSeek V4.1 was written by himself, but given the current pace of progress, in another six months to a year, the level of AI in writing operators will likely catch up to or even surpass his own.

A year ago, AI could only help him check documents, read code, and find bugs. Now it can read CUDA, PTX, and SASS, analyze the pause time of each instruction, and independently optimize operators. He anticipates that the next step will be for AI to design scheduling plans, evaluate performance, and complete implementations on its own. He is very clear that the better he optimizes the operators, the faster the training and inference of the DeepSeek model will be, and AI will catch up to him even faster. But even if he stops now, models from other companies will not stop, so he will continue to make the operators the best they can be.

He believes that he is unlikely to become unemployed, but he may be forced to "change careers," transitioning from writing operators himself to becoming a "mecha pilot" who manipulates agents. What he truly finds difficult to accept is not the disappearance of his job, but the possibility that he may never have the chance to do the work he loves again: "I have to bury my talent in yesterday." The article concludes with his reasons for staying at DeepSeek. He advocates that cutting-edge AI should be provided openly and cheaply to everyone and openly expresses his disbelief that Anthropic or OpenAI can achieve this. He worries that the strongest AI will ultimately be controlled by a few companies, further turning the technological gap into a gap of power and class.