Why everyone in AI is freaking out about DeepSeek As of a few days ago, only the nerdiest of nerds (I say this as one) had ever heard of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI subsidiary of the equally evocatively named High-Flyer Capital Management, a quantitative analysis (or quant) firm that initially launched in 2015. Yet within the last few days, it’s been arguably the most discussed company in Silicon Valley. That’s largely thanks to the release of DeepSeek-R1, a new large language model (LLM) that performs “reasoning” similar to OpenAI’s current best-available model o1 — taking multiple seconds or minutes to answer hard questions and solve complex problems as it reflects on its own analysis in a step-by-step, or “chain of thought” fashion. Not only that, but DeepSeek-R1 scored as high as or higher than OpenAI’s o1 on a variety of third-party benchmarks (tests to measure AI performance at answering questions on various subjects), and was reportedly trained at a fraction of the cost (reportedly around $5 million), with far fewer graphics processing units (GPU) that are under a strict embargo imposed by the U.S., OpenAI’s home turf. But unlike o1, which is available only to paying ChatGPT subscribers of the Plus tier ($20 per month) and more expensive tiers (such as Pro at $200 per month), DeepSeek-R1 was released as a fully open-source model, which also explains why it has quickly rocketed up the charts of AI code sharing community Hugging Face’s most downloaded and active models. Also, thanks to the fact that it is fully open-source, people have already fine-tuned and trained many variations of the model for different task-specific purposes, such as making it small enough to run on a mobile device, or combining it with other open-source models. Even if you want to use it for development purposes, DeepSeek’s API costs are more than 90% lower than the equivalent o1 model from OpenAI. Most impressively of all, you don’t even need to be a software engineer to use it: DeepSeek has a free website and mobile app even for U.S. users with an R1-powered chatbot interface very similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Except, once again, DeepSeek undercut or “mogged” OpenAI by connecting this powerful reasoning model to web search — something OpenAI hasn’t yet done (web search is only available on the less powerful GPT family of models at present). Read More
Andreessen is basically the tech/venture version of the Dilbert guy. Usually great success turns people into assholes, but in certain cases, it also turns them into morons. barfo
What's it like? If you've used a competitor, maybe you can compare to American ones. Investors note that the Chinese research cost was low, so the price will be lower...was it? Results are supposed to be superior and faster. As I understand it, the product name is R1, not DeepSeek. The company is DeepSeek.
I was only using it to spit out simple code for me, and that worked fine. It seemed quicker than ChatGPT at least. Just came across this article though. I wouldn't use it to become better informed on the news. https://www.reuters.com/world/china...ls-western-rivals-newsguard-audit-2025-01-29/
Summary, to save you busy decision-makers time: The news audit company NewsGuard (who is behind this?) checks chatbots for accuracy. It prompts each chatbot with 300 questions. 30 of the 300 are based on 10 claims spreading online which the audit company says are false. The article gives examples of controversies over which China and the West disagree. (It sounds like the definition of false is: If an answer repeats Western governments' side of the story, it's true. If that is different from the Chinese version, and the chatbot gives the non-Western version, the answer fails.) In 30% of the 300 query answers, DeepSeek R1 repeated the so-called false claims. In 53%, it gave vague or not useful answers. Total fail rate: 83%. Western competitors including OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google Gemini averaged a 62% total fail rate. The article closes with: "The importance of the DeepSeek breakthrough is not in answering Chinese news-related question accurately, it is in the fact that it can answer any question at 1/30th of the cost of comparable AI models," D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said.
