Day 3 is well under way. There is excitement of new ways of doing things with DeepSeek R1. There is anxiety of national security. There is MSFT investigating if distilling OpenAI is actually stealing. From my lens so far today, things are settling down a little bit, from financials to software vendors to freelancing users. So here are some additional observations:
(1) DeepSeek R1 is truly first of its kind in (1) it is MIT licensed; (2) it has a white paper in technical insights; (3) it is relatively straightforward integrating various aspects of its open source release with proprietary tools or solutions.
For disclosure, I subscribed Perplexity Pro for $20 month, since its CEO started pitching how wonderful DeepSeek R1 works for Perplexity AI services. Now I am not going to judge how it actually works versus DeepSeek website or DeepSeek R1 distilling Llama. They all good as long as it is 百花齐放。
(2) OpenAI interest group is freaking out. Based on my current understanding, DeepSeek V3/R1 and Alibaba Qwen2.5-Max and Kimi.ai etc. are material impacting the OpenAI business model. I have not heard anything w.r.t. 500B Stargate in the last few days. Almost everything was around DeepSeek.
(3) Independent or third-party vendors are really excited. Prior to DeepSeek open source releases, they were all scared of living under the shadow of hyperscalers. The memory of the first internet bubble and the second cloud bubble lingers: if you don't have bubbly XYZ then your business is going to be obsolete. Now with DeepSeek and other competing offerings, we are fundamentally entering into the next phase of solution integration and enduser deliverables in real world use cases.
We are truly living in an interesting time ...... Happy Chinese New Year to everyone!
It’s the Democratization of AI technology. Before this the big companies hoarded all the knowhows but now small businesses have a chance to compete too.
So in a sense DeepSeek is the Prometheus bringing fire to man kind. It doesn’t matter if it gets banned or destroyed or whatever. The genie is out of the bottle.