Techonology

How Chinese AI start-up DeepSeq is competing with OpenAI and Google

The day after Christmas, a small Chinese start-up called DeepSec unveiled a new AI system that can match the capabilities of cutting-edge chatbots from companies like OpenAI and Google.

That alone would have been a milestone. But the team behind the system, called DeepSeq-V3, took an even bigger step forward. one in research paper Explaining how they built the technology, DeepSec engineers said they used only a fraction of the typical computer chips that leading AI companies rely on to train their systems.

These chips are at the center of a tense technological competition between the United States and China. As the U.S. government works to maintain the country’s lead in the global AI race, it is trying to limit the number of powerful chips, such as those made by Silicon Valley firm Nvidia, that rival China and other rivals. Can be sold.

But the performance of the DeepSeq model raises questions about the unintended consequences of the US government’s trade sanctions. The controls have forced researchers in China to get creative with a wide range of tools that are freely available on the Internet.

The DeepSeq chatbot answered questions, solved logic problems and wrote its own computer programs, as well as anything already on the market, according to benchmark tests by American AI companies.

And it was built on the cheap, challenging the prevailing idea that only the tech industry’s biggest companies – all of them based in the United States – can afford to build the most advanced AI systems. Chinese engineers said they needed only $6 million in raw computing power to build their new system. This is about 10 times less than what tech giant Meta produces its latest AI technology.

Chris V., an investor with venture capital firm Page One Ventures. “The number of companies that have $6 million to spend outweighs the number of companies that have $100 million or $1 billion to spend,” Nicholson said. AI Technologies.

Since Openai kicked off the AI ​​boom with the release of CHATGPT in 2022, many experts and investors had concluded that no company could compete with the market leaders without spending hundreds of millions of dollars on specialized chips.

The world’s leading AI companies train their chatbots using supercomputers that use 16,000 chips, if not more. DeepSec engineers, on the other hand, said they only needed 2,000 specialized computer chips from Nvidia.

Constraints on chips in China forced DeepSeq engineers to “train it more efficiently, so it can still be competitive,” said Jeffrey Ding, an assistant professor at George Washington University who specializes in emerging technology and international Expert in relationships.

Earlier this month, the Biden administration issued new rules aimed at preventing China from obtaining advanced AI chips through other countries. The rules build on several earlier rounds of restrictions that prevented Chinese companies from being able to buy or make cutting-edge computer chips. President Trump has not yet indicated whether he will maintain the rules or rescind them.

The US government has tried to keep advanced chips out of the hands of Chinese companies over concerns they could be used for military purposes. In response, some firms in China have stockpiled thousands of chips, while others have sourced them from an underground market of smugglers.

DeepSeek is run by a quantitative stock trading firm called High Flyer. By 2021, it had channeled its profits into acquiring thousands of Nvidia chips, which were used to train its earlier models. The company, which did not respond to requests for comment, is known in China for scooping up fresh talent from top universities with the promise of high salaries and the ability to pursue the research questions that most pique their interest. Are.

Zihan Wang, a computer engineer who previously worked on a DeepSeq model, said the company also hires people without any computer science background to help them understand the technology and pass the notoriously difficult Chinese college entrance exam. Be able to generate rhyme and ace questions.

DeepSec does not make any products for consumers, leaving its engineers to focus solely on research. That means its technology isn’t hemmed in by the strictest aspects of China’s regulations on AI, which require consumer-facing technology to comply with government controls on information.

Major US companies continue to advance the state of the art in AI In December, Openai unveiled a new “reasoning” system called O3 that exceeds the performance of existing technologies, although it is not yet widely available outside the company. Is. But DeepSec continues to show that it is not far behind. This month, it released an impressive logic model of its own.

(The New York Times has sued Openai and its partner, Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to its AI system. Openai and Microsoft have denied those claims.)

An important part of this rapidly changing global market is an old idea: open source software. Like many other companies, DeepSec has open sourced its latest AI system, meaning it has shared the underlying code with other businesses and researchers. This allows others to manufacture and distribute their own products using similar technologies.

While employees at big Chinese technology companies are limited to collaborating with colleagues, “if you work on an open source, project. He helps other people and companies build products using DeepSec’s system.

The open source ecosystem for AI gathered steam in 2023 when Meta freely shared a system called Llama. Many recognized that this community would only thrive if companies like Meta – tech giants with massive data centers filled with specialized chips – continued to open source their technologies. But DeepSec and others have shown that they, too, can extend the powers of open source technologies. ,

Many executives and pundits have argued that large American companies should not open source their technologies because their use could spread disinformation or cause other serious harm. Some US lawmakers have explored the possibility of stopping or throttling the practice.

But others argue that if regulators stifle the progress of open source technology in the United States, China will gain a significant lead. If the best open source technologies come from China, they argue, American developers will build their own systems on top of those technologies. In the long run, this could put China at the heart of AI research and development.

“The center of gravity of the open source community is moving to China,” said Ion Stoica, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “This could be a major threat to the United States,” because it allows China to accelerate the development of new technologies.

Hours after his inauguration, President Trump rescinded a Biden administration executive order that threatened to curb open source technologies.

Dr. Stoica and his students recently built an AI system called Sky-T1, which rivals the performance of OpenIE’s latest system, called OpenEye O1, on some benchmark tests. He needed only $450 in computing power.

They did this by building on top of two open source technologies released by Chinese tech giant Alibaba.

Their $450 system is not as powerful as OpenEye’s technology or DeepSec’s newer system. And the technologies they use are unlikely to yield systems that exceed the performance of leading technologies. But the project showed that even operations with minuscule resources could build competitive systems.

Reuven Cohen, a technology consultant in Toronto, has been using DeepSeq-V3 since late December. He says it’s comparable to the latest systems from Openai, Google, and San Francisco start-up Anthropic—and much cheaper to use.

“DeepSec is a way for me to save money,” he said. “This is the kind of technology that someone like me would want to use.”

#Chinese #startup #DeepSeq #competing #OpenAI #Google

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