Chinese researchers just built an open-source rival to ChatGPT in 2 months, and Silicon Valley is freaked out

Speaking of “AI”, the Chinese company DeepSeek has lobbed a grenade dead-centre into the middle of the “AI” bubble, and it’s been incredibly entertaining to watch. DeepSeek has released several new “AI” models, which seem to rival or even surpass OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT models – but with a massive twist: DeepSeek, being Chinese, can’t use NVIDIA’s latest GPUs, and as such, was forced to work within very tight constraints. They’ve managed to surpass ChatGPT’s best models with a fraction of the GPU horsepower, and thus a fraction of the cost, and a fraction of the energy requirements.

But unlike ChatGPT’s o1, DeepSeek is an “open-weight” model that (although its training data remains proprietary) enables users to peer inside and modify its algorithm. Just as important is its reduced price for users — 27 times less than o1.

Besides its performance, the hype around DeepSeek comes from its cost efficiency; the model’s shoestring budget is minuscule compared with the tens of millions to hundreds of millions that rival companies spent to train its competitors.
↫ Ben Turner at LiveScience

The fallout has been disastrous for NVIDIA, in particular. The company’s stock price tumbled 17% today, and more entertaining yet, the various massive investments of hundreds of billions of dollars into western “AI” seem like a huge waste of money. The DeepSeek models are also nominally open source, and are clearly showing that most likely, there simply isn’t a huge “AI” market worth hundreds of billions of dollars dollars at all. On top of that, the US is clearly not ahead in “AI” at all, as was the common wisdom pretty much until yesterday.

Of course, DeepSeek is Chinese, and that means censorship – the real kind – is a thing. Asking the latest DeepSeek model about the massacre at Tiananmen Square returns nothing, suggesting the user ask about other topics instead. I’m sure over the coming weeks more and more or these kinds of censorship will be discovered, but hopefully its open source nature will allow the models to be adapted and changed to remove such censorship. Do note that all of these “AI” models are all deeply biased because they’re trained on content that is itself deeply biased, thereby perpetuating and amplifying damaging stereotypes and inaccuracies, especially since people have a tendency to assume computers can’t be biased.

Whatever may happen, at least OpenAI losing its job to “AI” is hilarious.