Chinese technology start-up DeepSeek has taken the tech world by storm with the release of two large language models (LLMs) that rival the performance of the dominant tools developed by US tech giants — but built with a fraction of the cost and computing power.
On 20 January, the Hangzhou-based company released DeepSeek-R1, a partly open-source ‘reasoning’ model that can solve some scientific problems at a similar standard to o1, OpenAI's most advanced LLM, which the company, based in San Francisco, California, unveiled late last year. And earlier this week, DeepSeek launched another model, called Janus-Pro-7B, which can generate images from text prompts much like OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion, made by Stability AI in London.
If DeepSeek-R1’s performance surprised many people outside of China, researchers inside the country say the start-up’s success is to be expected and fits with the government’s ambition to be a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI).
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