A Chinese startup called DeepSeek has launched a new AI model, according to Business Today. It has drawn significant attention from the tech community because it seems to be direct competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the model that made generative AI a household name. The emergence of this new company has also highlighted how Chinese AI companies are finding innovative ways to overcome challenges like US chip export sanctions.
DeepSeek R1’s performance has sparked conversations about the global AI landscape, with some celebrating its success as a win for open-source development, while others question its broader implications for AI competition.
DeepSeek R1 is an advanced large language model (LLM) designed for reasoning-intensive tasks, such as mathematics and coding. The model’s developers, based in Hangzhou, China, claim it matches or even outperforms some of OpenAI’s popular models, like ChatGPT o1, but at a much lower cost.
One of DeepSeek’s standout features is its efficiency. Unlike many resource-heavy AI models, it was designed to minimise memory use and reduce computing demands, making it more accessible for researchers and developers. Smaller versions of the model are open-sourced and can even run on laptops.