If you’ve been anywhere on the internet this past week, then you have likely seen the term DeepSeek AI making rounds on headlines. Even if not, now you know the name and are wondering what about it has got everyone interested. Well, read along, because in this article, we will take you through understanding what DeepSeek AI is, its importance, and how it affects your business.
What is DeepSeek AI?
DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company, founded in July 2023 by former hedge fund executive Liang Wenfeng and backed by quantitative investment giant High-Flyer Quant. It develops open-source large language models (LLMs) and has since its launch released impressive models like the DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1. The DeepSeek AI is an advanced AI-powered chatbot just like any other chatbot used for day-to-day personal and business tasks, but its peculiarity is that it requires a tenth of the computing power of a comparable LLM. The DeepSeek-R1 model launched on 10 January 2025 is reportedly as powerful as the OpenAI’s o1 model in tasks like mathematics and coding. It is a “reasoning” model, which means that it produces responses incrementally, simulating a process similar to how humans reason.
Why is it Relevant?
Deepseek AI’s relevance comes from its low training cost and open-source code. The R1 model provides comparable responses to other contemporary Large Language Models(LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o and o1, and at a significantly lower cost. Training the model costs only $6 million compared to $100 million for OpenAI’s GPT-4 in 2023. It also uses less memory and requires a tenth of the computing power of a comparable LLM.
More impressively, DeepSeek has achieved these feats despite the restrictions of the United States on the export of advanced AI chips like Nvidia’s H100 and A100 to China. The restrictions forced the company to leverage its limited resources with strategies like reinforcement learning, distillation, and mixture-of-experts(MoE) architecture to produce the same results.
These features make the AI chatbot a unique contender to revolutionize the AI industry by drastically reducing production costs and energy expenditure, whilst maintaining similar industry standards.
How Does This Affect Your Business?
After its release on 10 January 2025, DeepSeek’s AI chatbot app surpassed all AI chatbots in days to become the most downloaded app on the App Store. This popularity underscores its acceptance as an industry standard. Its free plans coupled with the open source code translate to less business cost, increased profit margins, and less energy spent in running programs.
Several business needs require AI, and businesses can leverage DeepSeek AI to streamline processes, improve customer experience, boost PR, and maximize profits. The implementation of DeepSeek AI in business has profound impacts and can help businesses thrive in ways like:
- Enhanced Efficiency: Real-time data processing allows businesses to react swiftly to emerging trends.
- Improved Decision-Making: By converting complex datasets into clear, actionable format, DeepSeek AI empowers decision-makers to make informed choices like adjusting marketing strategies based on consumer trends. The predictive analysis offers a decisive edge.
- Cost and Time Savings: By automating data collection, analysis, reporting, and other mundane work processes in business, a lot of resources are freed up to focus on more nuanced work. The best part is the DeepSeek AI is free and has paid options that are way less costly than conventional AI models.
- Customization for Industry-Specific Needs: Just like other AI chatbots, it has customizable modules that ensure that generated insights are relevant to your business.
- Risk Mitigation: Though there are disputes regarding its security, it provides tools for precise use in industries like healthcare and finance where errors can have significant consequences. The platform’s API(Application Programming Interface) offers tools for precise risk assessment and fraud detection. It is also able to identify anomalies that give you time to act proactively.
- Scalability: Whether it’s a small business or a global one, DeepSeek AI is able to serve business needs. Its cloud-based program ensures the platform can handle increased workload seamlessly.
In the same manner that DeepSeek AI shows positive prospects in business, it also spells trouble for others, particularly rival businesses. This is exemplified by the massive drop of about $600 billion in Nvidia’s market cap (the largest single-day loss in stock market history). Nvidia is the dominant market force in AI chipset production. They make profits by leveraging their chips that provide enormous computing power for AI, and the development of an AI that requires minimal chips to produce similar results spelled trouble for the company. Other similar businesses have also been affected by this.
AI investing is also about to see a huge change as investors are seeking more efficient models that provide higher ROIs. A rise in AI adoption is also imminent as the reduced cost of DeepSeek will create more avenues for companies to utilize the APIs to develop real-world products. There will also be intensified business tensions between the US and China with policy shifts and tighter export controls.
In short, the business scape is about to see a sharp change and everyone is on edge looking for opportunities to leverage the DeepSeek game-changer.
The Bottom Line
DeepSeek AI is definitely worth the hype as it heralds an era of less costly AI chatbots. The focus will shift from hardware-intensive investments to focus on a scalable infrastructure and more open-source collaboration.
It however does have a huge challenge of accuracy and information censorship. The AI’s Ts and Cs outrightly notify users to verify the authenticity and accuracy of outputs. There are also cases of censorship of information pertaining to sensitive periods in Chinese history and even cases of the chatbot parroting Chinese government positions while answering questions unrelated to China.
Either way, the competition DeepSeek AI will create will favor businesses as these AI companies are forced to improve their services and reduce costs in order to compete. There will be an era of AI growth and we will expect more AI startups and companies to launch (and close) and be acquired to fight for a seat in the global market.
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