Source: United Kingdom – Executive Government & Departments
Scientists comment on DeepSeek, a new AI Chatbot.
Prof Neil Lawrence, DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, said:
“I think the progress is unsurprising, and I think it’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the type of innovation we can expect in these models. History shows that big firms struggle to innovate as they scale, and what we’ve seen from many of these big firms is a substitution of compute investment for the intellectual hard work. I’ve been suggesting that this has made the conditions ideal for a “Dreadnaught moment” where current technology is rapidly rendered redundant by new thinking. I don’t think DeepSeek is it, because the innovations deployed are relatively incremental, but it shows that we’re still in the age of the Newcomen engine, there’s plenty of space for budding James Watts to emerge, and that they are less likely to come from established players.”
Comment provided by the SMC pilot for Ireland:
Dr Deepak Padmanabhan, Senior Lecturer, School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen’s University Belfast, said:
“DeepSeek is causing massive disruption in financial markets. Mainstream narratives contrast the technology with ChatGPT and illustrate the differences in technological aspects. The far more long-reaching effect it would have would not be technological, it would be political, for it could disrupt the paradigms entrenched in the tech industry in substantive ways. There could be several aspects:
“Open-Source Software: DeepSeek’s code to train AI models is open source. This means that anybody can download the code and use it to develop their own AI. This is a significant step towards democratisation of AI. The open-source availability of code for an AI that competes well with contemporary commercial models is a significant change. Yet, if one is to download and run the code to develop their own AI, they would still need to have access to large datasets and tremendous computational power – but this is nevertheless a massive step forward.
“Computational Power: AI has been noted to pose massive computational requirements over the past decade leading to corporate dominance in AI research [ https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade2420 ]. With massive compute requirements yielding well to monopolisation of the space, big tech, and the government funding landscape (that are in turn influenced by big tech) have shown limited interests in prioritising AI research towards reducing computational requirements. DeepSeek’s models have been noted to require far lesser computational requirements than today’s commercial models. This could potentially ignite new interest in reducing computational requirements for future AI, with positive effects towards environment.
“No plans for Commercialisation: It has been highlighted that DeepSeek has no plans for commercialisation [ https://www.chinatalk.media/p/deepseek-ceo-interview-with-chinas ]. This makes it a very interesting development in that this marks a moment when a player with qualitatively different ideas enters a commercially-dominated space. This is a change against the prevailing trends – OpenAI was noted as moving to a full commercial model (from a partly non-profit model) in recent times. It may be interesting how commercial players respond to this challenge.
“In other words, the entry of DeepSeek could potentially hasten a paradigm shift in AI and pose a real challenge to commercial dominance in the sector. It may be a little too far to see this as a pathway towards taking AI into public hands, but that’s the direction of travel that DeepSeek brings to the table.
“Cheaper AI, Pervasive AI: One of the potential first effects would be cheaper consumer AI, and a fall in the profit margins within the tech sector. But it could also accelerate disruption by making AI pervasive, bringing more sectors and more jobs under threat.
“Cautious Optimism: It may be tempting to hope that open-source AI would lead to effects similar to what was seen in the 1990s when the dominance of Microsoft’s windows was challenged very well by open-source Linux. Yet, AI is not just software and computational resources – there is data too. So, there are further hurdles to overcome. We could view this development with optimism, but we must be cautious. For example, the ethos of the open-source movement was diluted with corporate players substantively entering the system leading to what has been called a ‘Corporate dominance in Open Source Ecosystems’ [ https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3540250.3549117 ]. To develop, sustain and strengthen open-source ethos within AI would require many more developments in the same direction as DeepSeek.”
Declared interests
Prof Neil Lawrence: No conflicts.
Dr Padmanabhan: None