When Chinese quant hedge fund founder Liang Wenfeng went into AI research, he took 10,000 Nvidia chips and assembled a team of young, ambitious talent. Two years later, DeepSeek exploded on the scene.

DeepSeek's new R1 model matches or beats OpenAI's performance while being free and open-source—and it got there in a fascinating way.

A new player, DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, has shaken up Silicon Valley with its cost-efficient language model, DeepSeek-R1, rivaling OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Despite US export controls on advanced AI chips,

The company built a cheaper, competitive chatbot with fewer high-end computer chips than U.S. behemoths like Google and OpenAI, showing the limits of chip export control.

On Monday, Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released its new R1 model family under an open MIT license, with its largest version containing 671 billion parameters. The company claims the model performs at levels comparable to OpenAI's o1 simulated reasoning (SR) model on several math and coding benchmarks.

With its MIT license and ultra-low costs, DeepSeek could be an appealing and cost-effective option for enterprise adoption.