DeepSeek just blew up the AI industry’s narrative that it needs more money and power
CNN
The story of AI in the 2020s has gone something like this:
The story of AI in the 2020s has gone something like this: And finally, in the year 2025, here comes DeepSeek to blow up the industry’s whole narrative about AI’s bottomless appetite for power, and potentially break the spell that had kept Wall Street funneling money to anyone with the words “harnessing artificial intelligence” in their pitch deck. ICYMI: DeepSeek dropped a bomb known as R1 that’s got all of Silicon Valley and much of Wall Street in a tizzy. The Chinese company’s large language model is basically a cheaper, more efficient ChatGPT, built on a fraction of OpenAI’s budget and using far fewer chips than any other leading chatbot. “That is a massive earthquake in the AI sector,” Gil Luria, head of tech research at investment group D.A. Davidson, told me. “Everybody is looking at it and saying, ‘We didn’t think this is possible. And since it is possible, we have to rethink everything that we have been planning.’” Suddenly, all that money and computing power that the Sam Altmans, Mark Zuckerbergs and Elon Musks have been saying are crucial to their AI projects — and thus America’s continued leadership in the industry — may end up being wildly overblown.
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