China’s DeepSeek AI might be smarter than OpenAI’s smartest AI

There’s a new AI player in town, and you might want to pay attention to this one.

On Monday, Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek launched a new, open-source large language model called DeepSeek R1.

According to DeepSeek, R1 wins over other popular LLMs (large language models) such as OpenAI in several important benchmarks, and it’s especially good with mathematical, coding, and reasoning tasks.

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DeepSeek R1 is actually a refinement of DeepSeek R1 Zero, which is an LLM that was trained without a conventionally used method called supervised fine-tuning. This made it very capable in certain tasks, but as DeepSeek itself puts it, Zero had “poor readability and language mixing.” Enter R1, which fixes these issues by incorporating “multi-stage training and cold-start data” before it was trained with reinforcement learning.

Arcane technical language aside (the details are online if you’re interested), there are several key things you should know about DeepSeek R1. First, it’s open source, meaning it’s up for scrutiny from experts, which should alleviate concerns about privacy and security. Second, it’s free to use as a web app, while API access is very cheap ($0.14 for one million input tokens, compared to OpenAI’s $7.5 for its most powerful reasoning model, o1).

Most importantly, this thing is very, very capable. To test it out, I immediately threw it into deep waters, asking it to code a fairly complex web app which needed to parse publicly available data, and create a dynamic website with travel and weather information for tourists. Amazingly, DeepSeek produced completely acceptable HTML code right away, and was able to further refine the site based on my input while improving and optimizing the code on its own along the way.

I also asked it to improve my chess skills in five minutes, to which it replied with a number of neatly organized and very useful tips (my chess skills did not improve, but only because I was too lazy to actually go through with DeepSeek’s suggestions).

I then asked DeepSeek to prove how smart it is in exactly three sentences. Bad move by me, as I, the human, am not nearly smart enough to verify or even fully understand any of the three sentences. Notice, in the screenshot below, that you can see DeepSeek’s “thought process” as it figures out the answer, which is perhaps even more fascinating than the answer itself.

We get it, you’re smart.
Credit: Stan Schroeder / Mashable / DeepSeek

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It’s impressive to use. But as ZDnet noted, in the background of all this are training costs which are orders of magnitude lower than for some competing models, as well as chips which aren’t as powerful as the chips that are on disposal for U.S. AI companies. DeepSeek thus shows that extremely clever AI with reasoning ability doesn’t have to be extremely expensive to train — or to use.