The Five Quick Takeaways from all the Deep Seek Fuss
Now the dust has settled are the key points you need to take away from what Deep Seek meant?
I recently did some media on the Chinese AI Chatbot Deep Seek, but I did not have time to post about it here. So now that the dust has settled on it, what are the five takeaways from the fuss?
8 Minutes Radio Audio on What Deep Seek Means
Deep Seek is a new Chinese chatbot that is almost as smart as recent models from America; it is free, it uses some clever ways to create a smart, cheap AI chatbot, and it is open source so others can copy how it works. The five takeaways are:
If you are going to use it from the app version, which is based in China, you need to be aware that it may pass information on to the Chinese government. There are now versions running, for instance, on Microsoft platforms that are not based in China, but it’s likely that you will have to pay for them.
The Chinese startup followed the philosophy of the famous New Zealand scientist Earnest Rutherford, who split the atom. His philosophy was ‘we don’t have any money, so we are going to have to think’. The startup worked out smarter, cheaper ways of getting increased intelligence from an AI chatbot, and they have shared their techniques with the world.
It rattled stock markets because investors thought the low cost of Deep Seek AI would put the profits of the US AI firms in jeopardy. However, it is unlikely to radically undermine the price of AI intelligence because the demand for AI will continue to grow as people realise what it can do.
Deep Seek being open source, together with the current U.S. government’s reluctance to regulate AI, will mean that AI development will continue to accelerate. This will mean great benefits being delivered by AI. But at the same time, it will increase the major risks from AI as there will not be regulators overseeing it. No one has any clue as to how this will all play out.
AI is becoming central to geopolitical competition. This is both because of its economic benefits but also because of the perception that AI and robotics will become central to warfare. To put this view simply, the side that will win the next major war will be the side that can deploy smarter AI.
So those are the key takeaways. AI development is continuing to accelerate. This will be an exciting year for AI boosters and a scary one for AI doomers.