Not much, if any. It's a totally different approach to AI that none of my sources or references have seen before, which is partly why it's making such a huge wave in the field. I know they steal a shit-ton of IP, but they seem to be the originators of this stuff. I hear nobody yelling "thief"... at least not yet.
To be clear, I'm not an AI academic in big model learning stuff like this... I specialize in the global infrastructure and the development of something called "agentic workflows" as it relates to our specific use cases. Our yearly cloud bill, just for the AI part, is $350m. If this new shit requires way, way less cloud infrastructure, or can be run on the client device directly, it's a massive game changer, as the hyperscalers (Azure, Google, AWS, etc) aren't fighting over all the Nvidia GPU's that can be made any more. We rent thousands of GPU's that would be about $25k each to buy outright in order to do our generative AI. If that could be replaced with a shit-ton of non-GPU CPU's for pennies on the dollar, that are way more available, that would be awesome.
We are a few years past the point of Chinese theft being an issue, and more in the realm of Chinese tech superiority, they just see no need to advertise it or sell it to the West. Just look at their electric cars. Put another way, the AI bubble was going to burst sooner or later, but bubbles emerge and die based on a bunch of different factors The US economy overheating over the past few years, the tech sector saturation and business model maturity, the incoming administration hostile to China, and given the current regime, no one is lining up to buy from tech companies that watched Elon Musk give a nazi salute...all adds up to a good time to get your money out of American AI specifically and US tech in general. This is calculated in terms of timing, but a real enough threat to knock a point or two off the whole damned US stock market. I'd bet as more folks find out that it's legit (or at least, not bullshit), that tanking will continue. The hubris that the Chinese could actually deliver a better mousetrap without cheating or theft is staggering, though.
Trump: "We will invest $500b in AI infrastructure!" China: "Hold my rice beer..." Narrator: "And they no longer needed AI infrastructure."
I know we have a habit of just throwing hardware at a problem until it goes away, but we really sent a company that used to be best known for making video game cards to an ATH valuation of $3.5 trillion instead of optimizing our AI code.
Yes and no. It's cheaper, but it's very much in its infancy compared to ChatGPT and whatnots. Granted it's probably an early build.
Read this github page for test comparisons against various competitors. https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1
We use a wide variety of models, of various sizes (depending on their role in the process), from Meta's Llama that we self-host, to OpenAI's remote service, and this new DeepSeek is performing very well in our early testing. It really does appear to be a major game changer at this time, and not to be discounted just because it's Chinese and Open Source.
It's not quite that simple. If you use their online or default app, then yeah, data is sent to them. If you host their models in your own infrastructure, the data doesn't get shipped back to the Homeland. It depends on how you implement DeepSeek. We don't do it so that shit gets shipped back to the Homeland.
The real value here is in the method that they train their models. They’ve made that open for the world to use. Meta, with their Llama models, have not. They just give you access to a pre-trained model to use. OpenAI only gives you an API to hit for the model inferencing, while charging you a shit ton of cash for the privilege.
Go look at the evaluation results on this page: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1 These are standardized tests that any ML engineer can run against any model. We constantly run them against the models that we train with our own data for our specific use cases. They are UP THERE. Not winning in every category, but man, they are fucking good. We are currently evaluating whether or not they are good enough to use for what we need them to do in our case, and man, they are scoring well... and their price is damn compelling. (they're free).
I'm not a cyber guy so this is probably a dumb question, but are you concerned they're using you hosting their models on your infrastructure as a means to gain access to your systems and databases?
If it’s open source can’t chatgtp and such just copy it and have their own version? So does this mean we don’t need to be firing up old nuke plants just to power ai computations? Is this real life middle out processing?