Getting bored in Friday afternoon with tummy full of Chinese food, I would like to try some conspiracy thinking:
The timing of the latest DeepSeek releases.
DeepSeek-V3 was released on December 26th, 2024, which turned out to be the prelude of this whole DeepSeek drama. People were in western holiday season and had plenty of free time. Then on January 20th, 2025 DeepSeek-R1 was released, which was accidentally the inauguration day and 9 days before Chinese New Year. Also accidentally OpenAI and Meta et al. had already announced their new big releases "in early 2025", which up until then was the benchmark for closed LLM model and open LLM model. Now everyone in the world and their grannies are waiting for benchmarking new shiny releases from hyperscalers against this new kid on the block, DeepSeek. In between, there were also meaningful releases from Alibaba Qwen2.5-max, ByteDance Doubao 1.5 pro and Moonshoot Kimi.ai k1.5.
(1) Nobody is talking about Tiktok
(2) Everyone and his aunt is AI expert
(3) Small guys all over the world are coming out defending DeepSeek as an angel of open source
(4) Hyperscalers are uncharacteristically quiet in comparison to their 500B heydays prior to DeepSeek-R1 release
(5) US TV talking heads are actually mild on DeepSeek in comparison to their stance on Tiktok
(6) Some in China said it all happened due to Liang Wen Feng's conviction to open source
(7) Other in China said there some big hands behind this we-are-releasing-this-open-source-model playbook
What am I thinking now? Not much except that hats off to young engineers in China, who are more idealistic and less materialistic than being portrayed in social media. Anyhow, it has become a historical fact that, a private self-funded small tech firm in the beautiful heaven of Hangzhou has altered trajectory of generative AI development during the initial phase of the 4th industrial revolution.
My conspiracy thinking says that all this is not accident......
