If you have not heard, there’s a latest AI star in town: DeepseekHong Kong-based Quantitative Analysis (Quantum) subsidiary High-Flyer Capital Management has sent shockwaves throughout Silicon Valley and the wider world with the release earlier this week of its latest open source large reasoning model, Deepseek R1, which matches Openai’s strongest O1 model available – and at a fraction of the cost for users and the company itself (during training).
While the arrival of Deepseek R1 has already reshuffled the consistently much-maligned, fast-moving, intensely competitive market for latest AI models – previous months have seen Openai jockey with Anthropic and Google for the strongest proprietary models available, while meta platforms often emerge close enough to” rivals open source – the difference this time is that the company behind the hot model is based in China, geopolitical”Frenemy“the United States and whose technology sector has been widely perceived, up until this point, as inferior to the sex of Silicon Valley.
As such, there isn’t any shortage of hand-held stunning and existentialism from American and Western techies who suddenly doubt Openai, and the general big tech strategy of throwing extra money and more computation (graphics processing units, GPUs, powerful gaming chips normally normally normally normally chips for games It is used to train AI models) towards the problem of coming up with increasingly more powerful models.
However, some Western technology leaders had a largely positive public response to Deepseek’s rapid entry.
Marc Andreessen, co-creator of the pioneering Mosaic Web browser, co-founder of Netscape Browser and current partner at The famous Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) enterprise capital company, Posted today on x: “Deepseek R1 is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I have ever seen – and as open source, a profound gift to the world [robot emoji, salute emoji]. “
Yann Lecun, Chief Scientist of Fundamental AI Research (FAIR), published on his LinkedIn account: :
Deepseek has benefited from open research and open source (e.g. Pytorch and llama from meta)
They got here up with latest ideas and built them on other people’s work.
Because their work is published and open source, anyone can profit from it.
This is the power of open research and open source. “
And even Mark “Zuck” Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta AI, seemed to try to oppose Deepeek’s growth with its own post on Facebook Promising that Facebook’s latest open source Family Llama AI version will likely be a “leading state-of-the-art art model” when it is released later this 12 months. As he put it:
“”
He even shared a graphic showing the 2 gigawatt data center mentioned in his post overlaid on Manhattan:
Apparently, whilst he advocates a commitment to open source AI, Zuck is not convinced that Deepseek’s approach of optimizing for performance while using significantly less GPU than Major Labs is right for Meta or the way forward for AI.
But as US firms raise and/or spend record amounts on latest AI infrastructure, which many experts have noticed quickly (due to hardware/chip and software advances), the query stays which vision of the future will win in the end to develop into the dominant AI provider for the world . Or perhaps it is going to all the time be a multitude of models with a smaller market share? Stay tuned as this competition is closer and fiercer than ever.
