The AI world is evolving at a rate faster than ever, with new technologies gracing the market for commercial and personal use every day. Given this, a certain level of expectation had been set for the advancements we could be seeing in AI in the near future. Which is why the launch of Deep Seek created such waves.
A few weeks ago we thought we knew all the major players in the AI development industry, OpenAI, Meta, Google, and so on. Deep Seek has quickly established a place for itself on that list, with its new AI Chatbot, the Deep Seek RO1, boasting performance as effective as the products their industry giants offer.
Being a Chinese Company though prospective customers, especially business owners, are bound to have doubts about its legitimacy and ethicality, especially with the allegations purported against them by agencies such as OpenAI of stealing code. So what is their story? Let’s being with;
Deep Seek: The Origins
Deep Seek’s founder, Lian Wenfeng, actually got his start in the stock exchange industry. Graduating as a student of Economics from Zhejiang University, Wenfeng opened his own Stock Exchange company, High Flyer. The gist of the way High Flyer functioned was using an AI model to predict market trends and function accordingly. The business became wildly successful, and Wenfeng, wanting to continue exploring the application of AI, opened up an AI Lab under the flagship of High Flyer, known as Deep Seek Labs.
Interestingly enough, in 2021, Wenfeng actually started stockpiling Nvidia GPUs for an unannounced AI project that was later revealed to be Deep Seek Labs. According to 36KR, a Chinese media company, he acquired 10,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs before the US restricted the sales of such chips to China (and also globally).
Deep Seek Labs began research on their first version of the Deep Seek chatbot. They soon became incorporated, and with High Flyer as their investor and backer, became their own company. They soon after released their AI chatbot model that would cause waves in the industry, Deep Seek RO1.
Chat GPT Versus Deep Seek, Where did the enmity begin?
So what is with the arms race between Open AI and Deep Seek? Well;
Deep Seek RO1 consistently either matched or outperformed industry leading AI chatbot software on multiple benchmarks. Math, History, Literature, and Code production are some of the few benchmarks on which it was tested against these models. As seen in the graph, the model could clearly hold its own.
Not to mention, financially, Deep Seek seems to be doing a better job at keeping the operating costs lower than OpenAi or Google. Officials claimed that training Deep Seek only cost around $6 Million, a paltry figure when compared to the training cost that OpenAI revealed for their latest model, which branches over $60 Million. Meaning, their training costs for a model that met OpenAI’s model benchmark, was less than 10% of what OpenAI had to use.
Given this tough competition it is no surprise that tempers should rise. OpenAI even accused the team at Deep Seek for stealing code and reportedly banned many accounts from accessing ChatGPT 4.0, accounts deemed to be “risky”, suspecting them of being in collaboration with Deep Seek. This turned political very quickly, leading to the United States and China butting heads over the AI race.
What does Deep Seek do differently?
Given that we have now established Deep Seek’s origin, as well as it’s standing on the world stage when compared to other AI models. What does it do so differently? Well to start with;
The MoE (Mixture of Experts) Architecture
Deep Seek uses a “thinking” model not readily present in the architecture of the leading AI models, known as the “Mixture of Experts” architecture, or MoE. This architecture allows the model to analyse information using specific “parts” of its architecture. Consider a brain and all of its parts, you do not use your entire brain in formulating a single thought, the part of your brian that stores the information you wish to retrieve is the one doing the work.
MoE works the same way, the model contains different “Experts”, and as such, will only enable those Experts to “think” given the context of the question you asked it. This leads to lower operating costs (since there is not as great of a load on the model) and a quicker answer in response to your question.
Open Source Deep Seek
Deep Seek is also Open Source, which makes it a popular model for computer scientists, engineers, and most others who work in the IT industry. It also builds confidence in the security and privacy of the model. While we don’t know much about the company behind Deep Seek, the model itself is open to us. This is in stark contrast to, say, OpenAI, who are very open about their company policies and practices, but keep much of the backend working of ChatGPT to themselves.
Pricing Structures and Audience Interaction
When it comes to customer-side financials, DeepSeek RO1 is completely free to use while other popular models, Gemini, Meta’s LLaAMA, require tickets or are subscription based services. In response to DeepSeek RO1’s release though the companies behind these models have already begun working on free versions of their models to combat this competitive pricing. Consider OpenAI’s recent free release of the mini version of GPT 3.0.
Privacy
In terms of privacy, there isn’t much difference honestly. All major AI chatbot models acquire user data, including chat messages, user keystrokes, and more, which they claim to use for further training of their chatbots. The only real difference is that your data either goes to the US or to China. It is to be noted though that DeepSeek does restrict information on certain political Chinese topics, such as the Tiananmen Square Massacre or the currency political status of Taiwan.
In conclusion, DeepSeek may be a shiny new model for the industry, and yes it’s sudden appearance was a shock to the market, but all-in-all it performs with similar statistics to the current models on the market. In terms of use, it is not dissimilar to models like ChatGPT 4.0, but the price tag of it being “free” does give it an edge in the market. For those of you who still feel lost when it comes to deciphering AI products, feel free to reach out to us as Genetech Solutions, where our team of AI experts would be happy to help you out! But ultimately, choosing to use DeepSeek or ChatGPT comes down to personal preference. Which business would you rather support?
Let us know!
