DeepSeek shows the stakes for humanity couldn’t be higher

What is DeepSeek, the Chinese AI system that’s shaken the world, and what does it reveal about our future?

While DeepSeek has been around since 2023, what shocked the world was the release on 20 January of their DeepSeek-R1 AI model, a Large Language Model (LLM) that is just as intelligent as American giant OpenAI’s latest AI o1, but was far cheaper to create.

The increased efficiency comes from the artificial intelligence underlying R1. DeepSeek claims it only cost them a mere $6 million, while US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have spent more than ten times as much to create comparably smart AIs. DeepSeek’s success is due to many small engineering innovations – finding ways to get the same bang for much less buck using new techniques to allow the AI to learn more efficiently from its training data.

As for the improved reasoning capabilities of R1, these come from the same method underlying OpenAI’s newly released o1 model: leveraging so-called ‘reinforcement learning’ to teach AIs to better reason about their answers.