World’s top AI brains debate if DeepSeek’s model is a game changer

Experts weigh in on how quickly China is catching up on the US in AI, as DeepSeek takes an open-source approach

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DeepSeek has been making waves in the global AI community. Photo: Reuters

Published: 9:00pm, 3 Feb 2025

Major figures in artificial intelligence (AI) acknowledge the accomplishment of Chinese start-up DeepSeek, but caution against exaggerating the company’s success, as the tech industry weighs the implications of the firm’s advanced models developed at a fraction of the usual cost.

Industry heavyweights from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to former Baidu and Google scientist Andrew Ng have praised the open-source approach of DeepSeek, following its release of two advanced AI models.

Based in Hangzhou, capital of eastern Zhejiang province, DeepSeek stunned the global AI industry with its open-source reasoning model, R1. Released on January 20, the model showed capabilities comparable to closed-source models from ChatGPT creator OpenAI, but was said to be developed at significantly lower training costs.

DeepSeek said its foundation large language model, V3, released a few weeks earlier, cost only US$5.5 million to train. That statement stoked concerns that tech companies had been overspending on graphics processing units for AI training, leading to a major sell-off of AI chip supplier Nvidia’s shares last week.

OpenAI “has been on the wrong side of history here and needs to figure out a different open-source strategy”, Altman said last week in an “Ask Me Anything” session on internet forum Reddit. The US start-up has been taking a closed-source approach, keeping information such as the specific training methods and energy costs of its models tightly guarded.