Quotes
It’s a super competitive industry, right? And this is showing that it’s competitive globally, not just within the US,
Weil said on a call with reporters about OpenAI’s new ChatGPT offering for government agencies, in response to a question from CNN
That crazy AI data center build-out that we’ve been talking about for the last couple of years? They don’t need to do that anymore. They can build a lot less because they can provide a lot more services at a much lower price,
Luria saidIt’s so hard to own a scientific breakthrough” such as an AI model advancement
Kass said,
The United States already has the best closed models in the world. To remain competitive, we must also support the development of a vibrant open-source ecosystem,
former Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote in a Washington Post op-ed TuesdayAll those other frontier model labs — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google — are going to build far more efficient models based on what they’re learning from DeepSeek,
said Gil Luria, head of technology research at investment firm D.A. DavidsonWe are freaked out fairly, I suppose, because we thought we had global AI supremacy, when, in fact, we should be celebrating,
Kass saidIt’s plausible to me that they can train a model with $6m,
Domingos added
The model itself gives away a few details of how it works, but the costs of the main changes that they claim – that I understand – don’t ‘show up’ in the model itself so much,
Miller told Al JazeeraThe breakthrough is incredible – almost a ‘too good to be true’ style. The breakdown of costs is unclear,
Miller said
It’s very much an open question whether DeepSeek’s claims can be taken at face value. The AI community will be digging into them and we’ll find out,
Pedro Domingos, professor emeritus of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, told Al JazeeraIf they’d spend more time working on the code and reproduce the DeepSeek idea theirselves it will be better than talking on the paper,
Wang said, using an English translation of a Chinese idiom about people who engage in idle talkDeepSeek made R1 by taking a base model – in this case V3 – and applying some clever methods to teach that base model to think more carefully,
Hansen addedGPT-4 finished training late 2022. There has been a lot of algorithmic and hardware improvements since 2022, driving down the cost of training a GPT-4 class model. A similar situation happened for GPT-2. At the time it was a serious undertaking to train, but now you can train it for $20 in 90 minutes,
Hansen told Al JazeeraThese massive-scale models are a very recent phenomenon, so efficiencies are bound to be found,
Miller saidIt’s easy to criticize,
Wang said on X in response to questions from Al Jazeera about the suggestion that DeepSeek’s claims should not be taken at face valueThe constraints on China's access to chips forced the DeepSeek team to train more efficient models that could still be competitive without huge compute training costs,
George Washington University's Jeffrey Ding told AFP
AI models have consistently become cheaper to train over time - this isn't new,
he explainedDeepSeek V3's training costs, while competitive, fall within historical efficiency trends,
Lennart Heim, an associate information scientist at the RAND Corporation, told AFP, referring to R1's previous iterationIt's overturned the long-held assumptions that many had about the computation power, the data processing that's required to innovate,
Samm Sacks, a Research Scholar in Law and Senior Fellow at Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center, told AFPGiven the limitations of purely defensive measures, it may also ramp up domestic AI investment, strengthen alliances, and refine policies to ensure it maintains leadership without unintentionally driving more nations toward China's AI ecosystem,
he said