DeepSeek is China's entrance to the top shelf of language models, and it is competitive with U.S. counterparts while reportedly being vastly more efficient to develop. U.S. AI stocks, including hardware provider NVidia, are "plunging" as a result, reports CNN Business. CBS News calls it a "slump." The New York Times likes the work "sink".
DeepSeek is also catching investors off guard because of the low development costs for its AI app, which Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives pegged at only $6 million. By comparison, OpenAI, Google and other major U.S. companies are on track to invest a total of roughly $1 trillion in AI over the coming years, according to Goldman Sachs. … The company's AI app is available in Apple's App store, as well as online at its website.
DeepSeek is having growing pains of its own—"The service is free and as of Monday morning was the top download on Apple's store, although some people were having trouble signing up for the app." It's open source: unlike Tik Tok, it doesn't embody secret sauce that makes it vulnerable to political control. The chat app front end, though, censors topics that the Chinese government doesn't like talked about.
It's the AI bros gritting their teeth today and tweeting through it. Be ready for the only strategy they have: outspending their competition with your money.
Perhaps DeepSeek is Mr. Goodenough at work and time will reveal shortcuts, shortcomings and short shrift for the future. But I remembered this obliquely relevant quote from Tim Cook:
"China stopped being the low-labor-cost country many years ago. That is not the reason to come to China, from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill. The products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have, the tooling and working with the materials that we do, are state of the art. … In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I'm not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields."