THE emergence of the Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek has created significant technological, political, and financial ripples this week.
With claims that it has been developed at a fraction of the cost of its rivals, President Donald Trump has called the service “a wake-up call” for the US tech industry, which has seen the worth of several of its most valuable companies plummet on Wall Street.
Dr Ramon Ruiz-Dolz, a lecturer in computing at the University’s of Dundee’s School of Science and Engineering, said: “In 2017, when the fundamental architecture for modern AI was established, it was commonplace in both the scientific community and industry to openly share advances in natural language processing (NLP).
“This made it possible to democratise these advances and make state-of-the-art NLP technologies available to almost anyone.
“However, with the exponential growth in the size of language models, known as Large Language Models or LLMs, this was no longer the usual practice because of the high cost of training these models, and because most of those who had this capacity focused on commercialising the models.
“DeepSeek, by surprise, has taken a step forward, launching an open-weight model capable of competing directly with these closed models.
“The most interesting part of these new models released by DeepSeek, is not only that they can directly compete with state-of-the-art closed-weight LLMs, but that the training cost reported in the technical report is 50 times smaller than its closed-weight counterparts.
“Their efficient approach is, in fact, what allowed them to develop these models, overcoming the export regulations on the sale of high-performance AI GPUs to China.
“The impact of DeepSeek goes beyond NLP and AI research, as it has caused a historic stock market crash for tech giants such as NVIDIA, who were betting on the need for huge amounts of high-performing hardware dedicated to AI development.
“This represents, without any doubt, a hopeful light for the open advancement and democratisation, once again, of AI and NLP.”
