The Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has sparked a mix of excitement and skepticism after its reasoning model R1 was released, revealing concerns over the development and broader impact of its AI models. Here are five myths surrounding DeepSeek’s rise and their realities.
DeepSeek’s R1 model may have diminished the requirement for special-purpose AI hardware from Nvidia, but it does not spell doom for the chip giant. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pointed out that DeepSeek’s impact could increase demand for advanced GPUs, highlighting Jevons paradox – an economic theory suggesting that technological progress makes resource use more efficient, leading to overall consumption.
While DeepSeek’s R1 model is not fully open-source, its underlying architecture and weights are available under a permissive MIT licence. However, the data used to train the model has not been made publicly available, which raises concerns about true openness.
DeepSeek’s AI poses the same risk to privacy as other large language models (LLMs). The company’s Chinese origins and open-source nature have raised concerns, but its R1 model can be downloaded and run locally on devices, and Perplexity is hosting the model in data centers outside China.
The development of DeepSeek’s R1 model has also been seen as a win for open-source AI. Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun praised the company’s use of open research and open-source software.
However, some critics point out that DeepSeek’s results “make export control policies even more existentially important than they were a week ago,” according to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. The true impact of DeepSeek’s R1 model on Nvidia’s business and the broader AI landscape remains to be seen.
Source: https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-sci-tech/deepseek-decoded-98121340