Agencies
A little-known AI lab out of China has ignited fresh panic throughout Silicon Valley after releasing new AI models that appear to be able to outperform the best ones in the U.S. despite being built more cheaply and with less powerful chips.
This is how CNBC introduced DeepSeek, an AI startup that almost every tech and AI enthusiast must have heard about in recent days.
While media reports provide less clarity on DeepSeek, the newly released model, DeepSeek-R1, appeared to rival OpenAI’s o1 on several performance benchmarks.
This raised certain concerns and widespread talks in tech circles, but not as much as for the model itself but for the fact it was built despite U.S. curbs on technology and advanced chips to China and much cheaper than most of leading Western models.
“DeepSeek, as the lab is called, unveiled a free, open-source large-language model in late December that it says took only two months and less than $6 million to build, using reduced-capability chips from Nvidia called H800s,” the report from CNBC said.
“The new developments have raised alarms on whether America’s global lead in artificial intelligence is shrinking and called into question big tech’s massive spend on building AI models and data centers,” it added.
