Technology leaders respond to DeepSeek’s rapid rise

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a new AI star in town: DeepSeekA small Hong Kong-based quantitative analysis (quant) High-Flyer Capital Management company, has sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley and around the world it’s his the release earlier this week of a new open source model, DeepSeek R1which are compatible The most powerful version of OpenAI available o1 – and at a lower cost to the users and to the company itself (while training it).

While the arrival of DeepSeek R1 has already changed the topsy turvy, fast-moving, competitive market for new AI models – the past months have seen OpenAI sparring with Anthropic and Google on the most powerful models available, while Meta Platforms often come up with “close enough” open source fighters – the difference this time is the company behind the hot brand is settled in China, geopolitical “shy” of the US, and its technology sector was widely viewed, until recently, as inferior to that of Silicon Valley.

Therefore, it did not cause a decrease in hand-wringing and the presence of technology from the US and Western bloc techies, who suddenly suspect OpenAI is a major technological method to throw a lot of money and calculate a lot (graphics processing units, GPUs, powerful gaming chips are often used. for training AI models) to the problem of creating more powerful models.

Yet some Western technology leaders have had a positive public response to DeepSeek’s rapid rise.

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the first Moses browser, co-founder of the Netscape browser company and Current senior partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) cheap company, it is written on X today: “Deepseek R1 is one of the most amazing and impressive things I’ve ever seen – and as an open source, profound gift to the world (robot emoji, salute emoji).”

Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist for Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) division, wrote on his website. A LinkedIn account:

“For people who see DeepSeek’s work I think:
‘China surpasses US in AI.’
You are reading this wrong.
The correct reading is:
‘Open source models are outpacing proprietary ones.’

DeepSeek has benefited from open research and open source (eg PyTorch and Llama from Meta)
He came up with new ideas and built them on top of other people’s work.
Because their work is published and open source, anyone can benefit from it.
That is the power of open research and open source. “

And even Mark “Zuck” Zuckerberg, Meta AI’s founder and CEO, seems intent on countering DeepSeek’s rise with his own. your posts on Facebook and promises that Facebook’s new open-source version of the AI ​​family Llama will be “the most cutting-edge of art” when it’s released this year. Like he put it:

“This is going to be a big year for AI. In 2025, I hope that Meta AI will be the guiding force of more than 1 billion people, Llama 4 will be the technology leader, and we will create an AI engineer who will start to contribute a lot of code to our R&D. effort. To that end, Meta is building a 2GW+ datacenter that is large enough to cover a large portion of Manhattan. We will bring online ~1GW of compute in ’25 and end the year with over 1.3 million GPUs. We plan to invest $60-65B in capex this year as we expand our AI teams significantly, and we have the capital to continue investing in the coming years. This is a huge effort, and in the years to come it will drive our trade and business, unlock history, and expand America’s technological leadership. Let’s build!“

He shared a photo showing the 2 gigawatt datacenter mentioned in his post covered in Manhattan:

Of course, while he advocates a commitment to open source AI, Zuck isn’t convinced that DeepSeek’s approach to optimization while using fewer GPUs than large labs is suitable for Meta, or the future of AI.

But it is the US companies that raise and/or spending on new AI infrastructure that many experts have seen a slow decline (due to hardware / chip and software progress), the question remains that the vision of the future will win in the end to become the main leader of AI in the world. Or maybe there will always be dozens of brands each with a small market share? Stay tuned, because the race is getting closer than ever.