China’s model of AI that amazes Silicon Valley
A Chinese AI company that competes with ChatGPT, is getting attention in Silicon Valley for its rapid rise, almost outperforming American AI companies like OpenAI and Meta.
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI startup that builds large open source language learning models (LLMs), according to the company’s website.
The company launched the R1, a special model designed to solve complex problems, on Jan. 20, which “closes to the top 10 in the world in performance,” and is built much faster, with fewer AI chips, less power, lower cost than other US models, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The announcement of the latest version of the app came on President Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day as another Chinese-owned social media app, TikTok, was in the news about whether it would be banned in the US.
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Meta AI’s Chief Scientist, Yann LeCun, took to social media to talk about the app and it’s an instant success.
He revealed in a post on Threads, that what most stuck with him about DeepSeek’s success was not the additional threat posed by Chinese competition, but the value of keeping AI models open source, for anyone to benefit from.
“It’s not that China’s AI is ‘surpassing the US,’ but rather that ‘open source models are surpassing proprietary ones,'” LeCun explained.
“DeepSeek has benefited from open research and open source (eg PyTorch and Llama from Meta) They have come up with new techniques and build on other people’s work,” continued LeCun. “Because their work is published and open source, everyone can benefit from it. That’s the power of open research and open source.”
A few days after the release of the latest version of DeepSeek, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company plans to spend more than 60 billion in 2025 as it remains strong in AI.
Meta’s latest move aims to strengthen the company’s position against OpenAI rivals and Google in the race to dominate AI.
Big Tech firms have invested tens of billions of dollars to develop AI infrastructure after the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Meta’s announcement came days after Trump announced that OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle would form a venture called Stargate and invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure across the US.
“The Deepseek R1 is one of the most amazing and impressive things I’ve ever seen,” Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who advises Trump, wrote on the X blog. “And as open source, it’s a deep gift to the world.”
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“DeepSeek R1 is the AI ​​era of Sputnik,” Andreessen wrote in comments.
Alexandr Wang, CEO at Scale AI, a San Francisco-based software company, also spoke about the technology and said DeepSeek’s rapid success is “a wake-up call for America.”
“DeepSeek is a wake-up call for America, but it doesn’t change strategy,” Wang wrote in a post on X.
Wang explained that “the USA must innovate and run faster, as we have done throughout the history of AI” and “tighten export controls on chips so that we can keep track of the future.”
“All the big advances in AI have been American,” Wang said.
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DeepSeek’s development was led by Chinese hedge-fund manager Liang Wenfeng, who has become the face of the country’s AI push, the Journal wrote.
Experts told the Journal that DeepSeek’s technology is still behind OpenAI and Google. However, it is a close competitor despite using fewer and less advanced chips, and in some cases it skips steps that US engineers consider important.
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As of Saturday, the Journal reported that the two DeepSeek models were ranked among the top 10 in the Chatbot Arena, a forum run by University of California, Berkeley researchers who measure chatbot performance.
Although DeepSeek’s flagship model is free, the Journal reported that the company charges users who connect their applications to the DeepSeek model’s computing infrastructure.
Breck Dumas of FOX Business and Reuters contributed to this report.
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