A summary of a Chinese essay, with a few short translated excerpts. All views below are the author's; quotes are my translations.

On 14 September 2026, a DeepSeek engineer writing as intlsy published a WeChat essay titled 我不得不把才华埋葬在昨天 ("I have to bury my talent in yesterday"). He wrote the main attention kernel of DeepSeek v4.1 (the head-dim-512 MQA attention). The essay is a personal reflection on AI taking over his specialty, and it ends with an argument for open-weight frontier AI.

The essay went viral in Chinese Internet: WeChat shows it at "100k+" reads (the platform's display cap), with about 41,000 likes, 84,000 shares, 31,000 recommendations and 1,601 comments as of 7 October 2026. It is probably one of the most widely shared Chinese-language article of what AI automation looks like from inside a frontier lab, and thus a sample of what a large Chinese technical audience is reading and reacting to.

I think it might interest Lesswrong readers.

His argument

1. AI is catching up in his own specialty

He describes AI going very fast, from only an assistant that looked up documentation and found bugs to a system that can read CUDA, PTX and SASS, profile the [...]

---

Outline:

(01:22) His argument

(01:25) 1. AI is catching up in his own specialty

(02:08) 2. Why he keeps speeding up his own replacement

(02:48) 3. Not out of work, but forced to change what the work is

(03:32) 4. Worries about everyone else

(04:12) 5. Two futures, and his case for open AI

---

First published:
October 8th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/o8roRrdisBAjngHJN/a-summary-of-a-viral-chinese-essay-on-what-a-deepseek-kernel

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“A summary of a viral Chinese essay on what a DeepSeek kernel engineer’s opinion on automating his own job” by Skdk

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“A summary of a viral Chinese essay on what a DeepSeek kernel engineer’s opinion on automating his own job” by Skdk