DeepSeek is an attack on the artificial intelligence (AI) realm, and there are eight questions and considerations to bear in mind.
First, once the excitement wore off following the media storm after DeepSeek officially released R1 on Jan. 20, tech hobbyists and experts began to question whether such an advanced language model could have really been built with US$5.5 million. Of course not. DeepSeek’s official statement claimed the amount was used to further develop its older V3 model. As for how much it actually spent, they are keeping their lips sealed and have not released a concrete figure.
Second, DeepSeek made its statement on US President Donald Trump’s inauguration day, causing a stir in global stock markets. Is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) mobilizing media and making great pronouncements, or even using overseas consular offices to add to the information flood around DeepSeek? If a new AI company — one with only four full-time official employees — did not receive any help, how could it have produced a new AI language model in such a short timespan?
Third, if you ask R1 questions regarding topics such as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Taiwanese sovereignty, Xinjiang and the Uighurs, or its evaluation of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) or the CCP government, it is almost invariably an iteration of the following answer: “I’m sorry, can we talk about mathematics or physics?” Other users have used prompts that are more vague: If you ask about a man standing with a plastic bag in front of a tank, in reference to the infamous “tank man” who blocked several Chinese People’s Liberation Army tanks from advancing along a Beijing street, DeepSeek responds that it is thinking, or rather, it is making inferences. Then, as if startled into awareness that this is a sensitive prompt banned by the CCP, it responds: “I’m sorry. Let’s change topics.”
Former minister of digital affairs Audrey Tang (唐鳳) was able to use an ambiguous line of questioning on an offline version of R1 to bring up Tiananmen Square and the system surprisingly gave a fleshed-out answer without any censorship. The conclusion is that DeepSeek’s language model itself is not restricted, but the CCP is limiting the platform.
Fourth, AI models need to overcome a massive initial threshold of accumulating oceans’ worth of data. The most difficult aspect to collecting so much data is that a company has to separate and clean all of them. It also has to design question prompts and answers to train its AI model.
Years after setting up shop, OpenAI is still using a massive team of tech talent to curate and scour seas of data. They have burned through tons of cash, and spent thousands of hours annotating and correcting prompts and answers to achieve their nearly perfected GPT4 language model — a generative AI model. Other, smaller AI companies simply do not have comparable funding and resources, so they often cut corners. After downloading all sorts of compressed data, they recompress it and work to make it into something that performs well to form their own language models. That method is known as knowledge distillation.
Several industries are questioning whether DeepSeek used distillation and the answer is becoming ever clearer — it has.
Moreover, DeepSeek originally distilled its own model by basing it off OpenAI’s GPT4. OpenAI in September last year developed an inference model — the 01 language model — which includes mathematical reasoning, logical inference and its own unique editing functions.
Fifth, to prove that DeepSeek distilled OpenAI’s language model, the latter on Jan. 28 closed programming interfaces with massive traffic volumes. Not long after, DeepSeek announced that it would be temporarily suspending logins from foreign users due to a “virus,” and would only give access to mobile app users within China. Is that merely a coincidence, or a trick? The reader can judge for themselves.
Sixth, DeepSeek repeatedly emphasized that it was using Nvidia’s lower-end H800 chips in its data center, but when you ask the chatbot whether the company is using advanced Nvidia’s H100 chips — which are supposed to be banned from export to China — its answer is “yes.”
The US government found that the 10,000 or so H100 chips the company purportedly possesses were sent to procurers in Vietnam, then to Singapore and then China. Singapore has since come under scrutiny, as import data showed that its companies procured 20 percent of Nvidia’s H100, H800 and H20 chips.
Seventh, an Israeli intelligence company alleged that DeepSeek could implant malicious code in users’ devices to steal their private data by teasing it out of them. Does such user data make its way to the CCP’s Ministry of State Security or Ministry of Public Security? Users should be wary.
Eighth, OpenAI on Jan. 30 announced it was officially launching its latest language model, o3-mini. The model’s performance and convenience — its question-and-answer and logical inferencing already being called “genius-level” — blow DeepSeek’s R1 model out of the water, and its pricing is on par with the earlier o1 model — a great value. OpenAI is set to launch a more fully scaled o3 model.
When that happens, we would have our answer as to which model is a tech darling and which one would be left in the dust.
Tsao Yih Cherng is a literary and history writer.
Translated by Tim Smith
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