By: Saaketh Madhuvarsu
(No this article wasn’t created by AI)
What is Deepseek?
Deepseek is an AI created by the Chinese artificial intelligence company High-Flyer. High Flyer is a company owned by Lu Zhengzhe, but Deepseek was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng who is also a shareholder in High Flyer. Deepseek uses deep neural networks, which are types of machine learning that teach the AI how to properly understand the data, similar to students learning different note-taking styles. It also uses macroeconomics, which analyzes the patterns in stocks to predict future stock prices. Deepseek is an AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT, so why is it getting so much of the spotlight?
What makes Deepseek special?
Deepseek has gained rapid popularity and might change the course of AI. There are a couple of unique features that distinguish Deepseek from the others which I’ll go over.
- Free and Efficient Models :
- Deepseek is a very accessible AI, unlike the big AIs like Chat GPT which limit you to paid versions. The problem with free versions of AI is that they put many obstacles in your way. Putting a cap on things like the # of words you can type at once, the # of images you can generate daily, and more. These are just some of the small problems, but the main issue is that the quality of the AI is not as good as it can be. This means the free models aren’t fed as much information or taught how to properly read which data is correct or incorrect. More effort is put into the paid models which can properly execute tasks. This means you can’t receive the AI’s highest potential answer. With one free model, Deepseek goes into the vast ocean of the internet and properly feeds itself lots of information. People have been very impressed by Deepseek’s results. So far at least, the owners of Deepseek will be keeping it free. Looking at how fast it is expanding from a financial and success standpoint we could expect the Deepseek Team to release a paid version, but hopefully, we won’t see a lack of quality in their free model.
- An Efficient Team:
- Open AI is a company that started 10 years ago and ChatGPT was released 3 years ago. High Flyer was a company that started 9 years ago and Deepseek was released 2 years ago; the popular model (r1) was released this year on Jan. 20, 2025. Deepseek has a highly efficient team which is helping them achieve a lot in little time. As of now, High Flyer has a team of about 160 people, while Open AI has about 3500 employees. Open AI spent about $500 million on ChatGPT while Highflyer spent about $100 million on Deepseek. Deepseek is achieving what ChatGPT did with almost 4% of the employees and with only about 20% of the money. With such few employees Deepseek is quickly training its AI loads of information and increasing its ability to make its own decisions. This is a giant gap in employees between the 2 companies, but this shows us how efficiently the people in Deepseek are working because they are rocketing up the ranks very fast with such a small team.
What is Deepseek’s impact?
Deepseek’s features and little resources shows us how much of an impact it has on us. We can even see it in our own financial lives. As you must know, Nvidia’s stock prices have been crashing down losing a whopping $600 billion because of Deepseek r1 entering the competition. This is because Deepseek uses Nvidia’s older GPUs (a GPU is the hardware used for AI to function), which is a lot cheaper and not as advanced. This proved to be very cost-effective whereas Nvidia sells the more advanced, high-end GPUs. The success of Deepseeks GPU brought Nvidia’s stocks crashing down by 17%.
All in all, Deepseek AI has proven to us that there are no limitations if you have the will. These guys are spending less than half the money that Open AI has spent and have less than a tenth of their employees and are shaking other big companies. It’s very exciting to see where this whole world of AI is going to end up.
Sources:
- https://tinyurl.com/mr4xv6b5
- https://tinyurl.com/3m553h73
- https://tinyurl.com/42mhsyxz
- https://tinyurl.com/ys3cek6h
- https://tinyurl.com/2zdknxre
