The successful launch of Chinese startup DeepSeek’s latest AI model, which impressed observers by running on less powerful chips than U.S. rivals like OpenAI’s o1, raised concerns about America’s leadership in the field and caused several major U.S. tech and AI stocks to plummet in premarket trading early on Monday.
What is known about Deepseek and its most recent offering?
DeepSeek is a less than two-year-old Chinese artificial intelligence business with its headquarters located in Hangzhou. In March 2023, the business was split out from High-Flyer Quant, a Chinese hedge fund that made extensive use of artificial intelligence to handle its trading. In November 2023, DeepSeek released its AI language model as an open-source product that anyone could download and install locally on their own PCs. Last week saw the release of DeepSeek’s newest product, R1, an open-sourced “reasoning model,” which the business says performs comparably to OpenAI’s O1 model in several benchmarks.
What Is Unique About Deepseek’s R1?
DeepSeek’s model also seems to be more efficient, meaning it uses less processing power to train and operate, even if it matches competing models from OpenAI and Meta on several benchmarks. According to the MIT Technology Review, this is probably an unintentional consequence of American export restrictions on expensive AI chips to China, which are pressuring Chinese startups to “prioritize efficiency.” In an X post, Silicon Valley venture entrepreneur and billionaire Marc Andreessen called R1 “AI’s Sputnik moment.” Since DeepSeek’s application programming interface (API), which enables other companies and platforms to use the startup’s AI model, costs only $0.55 per million input tokens and $2.19 per million output tokens, as opposed to $15 and $60 for OpenAI’s O1, the efficiency has also allowed DeepSeek to significantly undercut OpenAI on pricing.
Are responses censored by Deepseek’s AI?
Similar to a number of significant Chinese-based tech sites, DeepSeek seems to filter content that Beijing considers sensitive. For instance, the chatbot replies, “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope,” when questioned about the protests in Tiananmen Square. Let’s discuss another topic.
Unexpected Information
On Sunday, DeepSeek’s iPhone app surpassed OpenAI’s ChatGPT to take the #1 spot on the App Store’s download statistics for free apps in the United States.
