Introduction to DeepSeek
DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company launched it’s DeepSeek-R1 model, similar to OpenAI’s GPT-4o and o1, and by Jan 27, 2025, it has surpassed ChatGPT as the most downloaded free App on the iOS App Store in the United States. This disrupted AI tech giants in the UI Market.
Chinese AI company disrupted 1 trillion $ in US market
Nvidia, the chipmaking giant and infrastructure foundation of AI revolution suffered $589 billion loss (17%) in Market Value – The largest one-day drop for a company in Wall Street history.
This sparked panic in the tech-heavy Nasdaq index, wiping nearly $1 Trillion from Global Markets.
Why DeepSeek AI a game changer?
Open Source: Freely available for use, modification, viewing and designing documents for building purposes, thus accelerating community driven improvements unlike OpenAI’s closed model
Cost Effectiveness: DeepSeek has spent about 5.6M USD to train foundational model, while companies like Google, Facebook & OpenAI have used 100times more to fund the same!
Architectural Breakthrough
Mixture of Experts (MoE) Activates only subsets of the model per task, reducing computational load
Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) Optimizes attention mechanisms for resource constrained environment.
Efficiency
The architecture breakthrough enables DeepSeek to enable high performance without relying on cutting-edge hardware. Here’s a comparison of features with respect to efficiency:
Feature | Traditional LLMs | DeepSeek |
Architecture | Dense | Sparse (with Experts) |
Computational Cost | High | Lower |
Memory Usage | High | Lower |
Scalability | Limited | Higher |
Complexity | Lower | Higher |
Specialization | Limited | Higher |
DeepSeek is a perfect example of how constraints lead to innovation. By prioritizing efficiency & openness, it challenges AI leaders & hardware providers, and shifting AI innovation from US to China. Is China becoming a leader in AI and will it bring down US’s AI dominance? Only time can reveal!