Strawberry

Article

Strawberry is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 17, 2024 and February 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “I originally thought this was about Strawberry, but the timing is wrong”; “remember the rumors about “Q*” and “Strawberry”?“. It most often appears alongside Dean Ball, Metaculus, Nate Silver.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: September 17, 2024
  • Last seen: February 27, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

September 17, 2024 · Original source
I originally thought this was about Strawberry, but the timing is wrong: it’s a Google DeepMind AI that got just short of the gold threshold back in July. People seemed genuinely surprised by this!
February 27, 2025 · Original source
44: My list of links to publish today includes something like a dozen about DeepSeek, which now seems so thoroughly yesterday’s news that I’m tempted to throw them all out. But in case you still have questions about it, I felt most enlightened by takes from Dean Ball (X), Helen Toner (X), and Miles Brundage (X). The story seems to be that DeepSeek genuinely did a great job, made extensive algorithmic progress, and was able to create an excellent AI on chips scrounged up from before the export controls hit + mediocre chips that got through the export controls. Along with these real reasons to be impressed, there is also a little bit of illusion at work - OpenAI delayed announcing o1 for a long time (remember the rumors about “Q*” and “Strawberry”?) and DeepSeek was very fast to announce r1, which made DeepSeek seem closer behind OpenAI than they really were. Most of the smart people I read said that the absolute worst response to this (from an arms race point of view) would be to give up on export controls - if a rival has geniuses who can use resources ultra-effectively, you don’t want to also give them more resources!