Digital Horizons

Brand News: DeepSeek - A New Challenger to AI Giants?

• James Walker & Brian Hastings

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What if the next big player in AI isn't American? Join us as we unravel the excitement and controversy surrounding DeepSeek, a newcomer poised to challenge the dominance of giants like ChatGPT and Claude. This episode of Brand News dives into how DeepSeek is leveraging older NVIDIA GPUs and an open-source model to revolutionize AI development, potentially offering solutions at a fraction of the cost. We take you through the seismic shifts in the stock market and the waves of fear rippling through established AI titans, raising intriguing questions about the future of AI accessibility and affordability.

In our discussion, we don't shy away from the controversies, particularly the data privacy concerns tied to DeepSeek's Chinese origins. How will these issues affect its adoption, and what does this mean for developers and investors alike? Our team brings you insights on the strategic ambitions of DeepSeek to set a new standard for AI large language models. We explore whether this could be the dawn of more affordable innovation in the AI industry or just another passing tech trend. Tune in to discover why this is one story you can't afford to ignore if you care about the future of artificial intelligence.

The Digital Horizons Podcast is hosted by:

James Walker - Managing Director WHD
Brian Hastings - Managing Director Nous

Speaker 1:

Welcome back to Brand News. Today we are probably talking about what a lot of people in the AI space are thinking is that deep seek has arrived and what does that mean for the larger ones like ChatGPT, claude and more established, established brands out there? Because, from my experience from it is, it fucked the share market pretty quickly from the announce of it. We saw a lot of stocks decline quickly just on announcing its capabilities and how much cheaper it can run compared to some of its competitors.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of the American AI organizations are running scared a little bit. You can do it with a lot less, and they did it with lower capacity GPUs. They used the old NVIDIA GPUs, proving that they don't even need access to the brand new stuff to get this done. I'm excited about it. I think you can look up what it means and how it was built and how they did it somewhere else. I think there are still areas of it that are closely modelled off ChatGPT's model. For instance, if you ask DeepSeek, what is your model based off or what are you, it says it is ChatGPT and it's been made by OpenAI. It actually says that, so that's led people to believe. Maybe it's copied, but it is an open source that is going to dramatically reduce the cost of developing AI models across the world, so I think it's good for the AI industry to have this type of competition. I think a lot of people are scared that it's coming out of China.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's something that like even on a weekly, each week, our team go through updates and we cover off on Google, whatever all the different things within the digital market space, but we also talk about what's happening in the AI space, and that was one of the first things that they'd come across when searching for updates around this is that the fear that's being put out there around the ownership being that it is a Chinese platform in terms of the data, so it's saying that you know part of its privacy policy is it can track your keystrokes and it retains some information. But I'm like, if you're typing shit into a platform anyway, don't you expect that it might know what you've typed into it?

Speaker 1:

Like it's doing that, unless it's off platform. But I think that there is a lot of fear being put out there and I don't know whether that's just to get people a little bit worried about using the platform or if it's true, but I think that that's going to continue to roll out at the moment.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I think DeepSeek's intent is to become the standard. They're looking to create an AI large language model standard where the code is open source and available, so that the layer of apps and tools that are built into a platform is built into their platform. Openai want it to be theirs, and something this cheap and available will make it appealing to developers to use, regardless of some of the security concerns. I think at this stage I don't trust any of these big organizations. Ideally, for some reason I feel more comfortable with some over others, but I think the technology that is the most widely available and the best performing and the most that is, the most widely available and the best performing and the most efficient, is going to win and the cheapest and the cheapest yeah, because you get mass adoption for it right.

Speaker 1:

So all the people that can't afford the subscription base that some of the other platforms have, are able to use it for free and be able to get access to models which, from what I'm understanding, is comparable or better.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I think, to put that into perspective, openai's token cost is about $4.50, for I think it was a thousand or 10,000 for the same amount of tokens. On DeepSeek it was 10 cents. So that gives you you know, if you're a developer looking to start something or create something, it might just not be possible to do it with OpenAI, considering how cheap the other one is. So I think it's really exciting. It's shaking things up. I hope no one had any stock investments in any of the big providers.

Speaker 1:

I mean, they went up so far already anyway.

Speaker 2:

You've been investing in the video for a while.

Speaker 1:

You lost a few percent, but you're up overall right.

Speaker 2:

Yeah Well, let's see what happens with it. It's very exciting. That's it for Brand News for this week. Thanks for watching.