What do the world's leading AI minds say about DeepSeek?

Leading experts in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) acknowledge the remarkable achievements of the Chinese startup DeepSeek.

However, they also cautioned against overestimating the company's success, especially as the tech industry considers the real-world impact of the advanced AI models DeepSeek has developed at a fraction of the cost.

Influential figures in the AI ​​world, including Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Andrew Ng, a scientist who previously worked at Baidu and Google, have praised DeepSeek's open-source approach.

These accolades come after the company launched its advanced AI model, attracting widespread attention from the tech community. While DeepSeek is making a significant impact, questions remain about its sustainability and long-term competitiveness against industry giants.

Based in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province (China), DeepSeek has shaken up the global AI industry with the launch of its advanced open-source AI model, DeepSeek R1. Announced on January 20th, DeepSeek R1 demonstrates performance comparable to closed-source models from OpenAI – the company behind ChatGPT – but is developed with significantly lower training costs.

In addition, DeepSeek revealed that its foundational large-scale language model, DeepSeek R1-V3, released just weeks earlier, had a training cost of only about $5.6 million. This information raised concerns that tech companies may have overspent on graphics processing units (GPUs) for AI training. These concerns contributed to the sell-off of Nvidia's stock, a leading AI chip supplier, last week.

In a Reddit "Ask me anything" session last week, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, acknowledged that the company is on the wrong side of history by pursuing a closed-source strategy and needs to reconsider its open-source approach.

Currently, OpenAI maintains tight control over information regarding the training process, energy costs, and technical details of its advanced AI models.

However, Altman also emphasized that not everyone at OpenAI agrees with this view and that the transition to open source is not a top priority for the company at the moment.

Meanwhile, Andrew Ng, founder and former director of Google Brain and former chief scientist at Baidu, argues that the rise of DeepSeek and its domestic competitors is evidence that China is rapidly closing the gap with the US in the AI ​​race.

"When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, the US was still quite far ahead of China in the field of generative AI, but in reality, that gap has narrowed significantly in just the last two years," Andrew Ng wrote on the social media platform X.

He emphasized that, with the emergence of a series of AI models from China such as Qwen, Kimi, InternVL, and DeepSeek, China has clearly narrowed the gap with the US. In fact, in some areas like AI video creation, China has at times even taken the lead.

Accordingly, the Qwen AI model is a product of the Alibaba Group. Meanwhile, Kimi was developed by the startup Moonshot AI, and InternVL comes from the Shanghai AI Lab, a state-backed organization. These names are contributing to the strong rise of Chinese AI on the international stage.

Andrew Ng commented: "If the U.S. continues to stifle the development of open source, China will dominate this area in the AI ​​supply chain. Then, many businesses around the world will use models that reflect Chinese values ​​and thinking more than American ones."

Meanwhile, Shawn Kim, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, a multinational financial and investment banking firm based in New York, noted that DeepSeek is gaining widespread recognition at a time when major US technology companies are actively promoting this Chinese AI startup.

Since its launch, the advanced AI model DeepSeek R1 has attracted the attention of many large companies worldwide and has been integrated into their services. For example, the American semiconductor company Nvidia has integrated the DeepSeek R1 model into its NIM microservice, making it easier for users to access and exploit the potential of this model.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, one of OpenAI's investors, has also announced support for DeepSeek R1 on its Azure cloud computing platform and GitHub.

Not to be outdone, Amazon.com has allowed customers to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build applications based on DeepSeek R1, expanding access to this advanced AI technology.

Although DeepSeek is attracting considerable attention, some experts argue that the true scale and impact of this breakthrough may have been overestimated.

Yann LeCun, a leading AI scientist at Meta Platforms, rejects the notion that DeepSeek is helping China overtake the US in the AI ​​race. On Threads, he asserted: "The correct understanding should be that open-source models are gradually catching up with and even surpassing proprietary models."

Despite its initial success, DeepSeek still faces considerable skepticism, particularly regarding its actual costs and AI training methodology. Having been spun off from Liang Wenfeng's High-Flyer Quant hedge fund in May 2023, the company has not been fully transparent about the total cost of developing its models.

According to Professor Zheng Xiaoqing from Fudan University (China), the $5.6 million figure announced by DeepSeek for training the DeepSeek R1-V3 model does not include the costs of prior research and testing.

In an interview with China's leading business newspaper, National Business Daily, he stated that DeepSeek's success is largely due to technical optimization, but it will not have a significant impact on the AI ​​chip market or the hardware supply chain.