Deepseek Open Source model Promotes Fast Innovation and Extensive Application in China
aliks writes:
Glyn Moody writing for the techdirt.com site has a good summary of the status of Deepseek - with an added bonus of lots of links to his source material. Longish article, covering a lot of ground including usage of AI for social surveillance by the Chinese government
" It's just three months since the Chinese company DeepSeek released its R1 reasoning model. In that time, its global impact has been dramatic: An article in Fortune magazine described how DeepSeek had "erased Silicon Valley's AI lead and wiped $1 trillion from U.S. markets." It also immediately raised serious privacy issues in the EU. The speed at which DeepSeek-R1 was built, and the relatively low cost of doing so, has had another dramatic knock-on effect, shifting interest and investment away from closed development towards open source AI models. As Wired wrote when DeepSeek-R1 appeared:
However DeepSeek's models were built, they appear to show that a less closed approach to developing AI is gaining momentum. In December, Clem Delangue, the CEO of HuggingFace, a platform that hosts artificial intelligence models, predicted that a Chinese company would take the lead in AI because of the speed of innovation happening in open source models, which China has largely embraced. "This went faster than I thought," he says.
The open source nature of DeepSeek-R1 means that it is cheaper and easier to use it as the basis of other AI services and products, than to start from scratch. That's precisely what is happening in China, with the additional twist that many companies are doing so from a patriotic pride that Chinese computer technology has caught up with Silicon Valley. "
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