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DeepSeek: Competition good for markets

Media Contact

Becka Bowyer

The rise of DeepSeek has stunned the artificial intelligence world, threatening America’s dominance in AI. The company claims to have trained its new model R1 at a fraction of the cost and on far fewer high-end chips.


John Thickstin

Assistant Professor

John Thickstun, assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University, studies machine learning – specifically, generative models.

Thickstun says

“DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1 are an exciting advance for AI and open science. The DeepSeek App and API offers competitive products to OpenAI and Anthropic offerings at a fraction of the cost. This will encourage development of new AI-powered applications. Headline reports that DeepSeek-V3 was trained for a fraction of the cost of comparable models may be misleading; I expect that investment in computing infrastructure will continue to be necessary to unlock new capabilities for AI technologies. The company’s decision to release the weights of these models will promote scientific advancement of AI research. Although, like its competitors, DeepSeek has also been less than transparent about the data used to train these models.

“The bottom line: Competition is good for markets and transparency is good for science. DeepSeek is an exciting development for AI.”

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