China’s New DeepSeek AI Has Certainly Caused A Stir In The United States Amid Wild Cost Claims

Just when the world might have thought that OpenAI was the company to beat in terms of AI technologies, China’s DeepSeek has changed things up by launching a new model of its own, dubbed R1.

And initial reports are that it’s mightily impressive.

TechCrunch notes that many in the tech space have been waxing poetic about the R1 model, with Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen claiming that the AI capability offered by DeepSeek right now “one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen.”

This comes as R1 has found itself at the top of the pile in AI benchmarks, beating out OpenAI’s o1 model despite the difference in cost — OpenAI and similar companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on training their AI while DeepSeek claims to have spent just $5.6 million on R1.

Whether or not that’s actually accurate or not is a matter of argument, though. Some have suggested that DeepSeek might be hiding some of the costs associated with the project in order to drive buzz, and it seems to be working. The DeepSeek app has found itself at the top of the App Store rankings in the United States, beating out OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Whether or not this is a flash in the pan and whether people are willing to trust a Chinese-owned AI tool at a time when TikTok is in the crosshairs because of its own links to the country, remains to be seen.

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