An Editorial by Dawoud Kringle

DeepSeek is a privately owned artificial intelligence company based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. It was co-founded by CEO Liang Wenfeng in 2023 and is owned and solely funded by Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer. During the last week of January 2025, DeepSeek released a generative artificial intelligence app called DeepSeek-R1.

Their app threw a monkey wrench into the machinery of the world’s economy.

The DeepSeek app has caused serious tech and finance ripples and threatened to render OpenAI obsolete. It accomplished this by offering its service for free (to be fair, OpenAI does have a free version), performing its most advanced tasks at the same level as OpenAI, sometimes beating OpenAI’s best models. To complicate matters for Western tech companies, it was developed for $5.6 million with GPUs that run at half the memory bandwidth. Additionally, DeepSeek’s models can distill other models to make them run better on slower hardware (“Distillation” is a means of extracting understanding from another model. One can send inputs to the teacher model and use the outputs to train the student model). This means that even a small computer like a Raspberry PI can theoretically run local Qwen models (a series of large language models developed by Alibaba Cloud. It is designed to understand and generate human-like text across various tasks). In other words, anyone can buy a GPU that fits in their pocket and fulfills at least some of their AI needs.

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