Chinese DeepSeek Rolled Out an Open-Source Model that Rivals OpenAI’s o1

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IBL News
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IBL News | New York

The Chinese AI startup DeepSeek rolled out an open-source reasoning model called DeepSeek-R1 on Monday, and despite a smaller development budget, it said it rivaled OpenAI’s o1 and Google’s systems.

Other Chinese firms unveiled their reasoning models in the past weeks, including Moonshot AI, Minimax, iFlyTek, and TikTok owner ByteDance’s Doubao-1.5-pro.

These models claim to be capable of reasoning through complex tasks and solving challenging problems in science, coding, and math.

They also offer better pricing than the American models. For example, DeepSeek-R1, which matches OpenAI’s most powerful available model o1, offers $2.20 per million tokens.

Marc Andreessen, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) venture capital firm, posted on X:

Yann LeCun, the Chief AI Scientist for Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) division, posted on his LinkedIn account:

The DeepSeek engineers said they needed only about $6 million in raw computing power to build their new system.

The world’s leading AI companies train their chatbots using supercomputers that use as many as 16,000 chips, if not more. DeepSeek’s engineers, on the other hand, said they needed only about 2,000 specialized computer chips from Nvidia.

That is about 10 times less than the tech giant Meta spent building its latest AI technology.

DeepSeek is run by a quantitative stock trading firm called High Flyer. By 2021, it had channeled its profits into acquiring thousands of Nvidia chips, which it used to train its earlier models.

The company has become known in China for scooping up talent fresh from top universities with the promise of high salaries and the ability to follow their own research questions.

DeepSeek has open-sourced its latest AI underlying code. It also released a chat website and API.

 

“The center of gravity of the open source community has been moving to China,” said Ion Stoica, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. “This could be a huge danger for the U.S.” because it allows China to accelerate the development of new technologies.

Last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said they had finalized a version of its new reasoning AI model, o3 mini, and would be launching it in a couple of weeks.