Tech leaders respond to the rapid rise of DeepSeek

If you hadn’t heard, there’s a new AI star in town: DeepSeek, the subsidiary of Hong Kong-based quantitative analysis (quant) firm High-Flyer Capital Management, has sent shockwaves throughout Silicon Valley and the wider world with its release earlier this week of a new open source large reasoning model, DeepSeek R1, that matches OpenAI’s most powerful available model o1 — and at a fraction of the cost to users and to the company itself (when training it).

While the advent of DeepSeek R1 has already reshuffled a consistently topsy turvy, fast moving, intensely competitive market for new AI models — previous months saw OpenAI jockeying with Anthropic and Google for the most powerful proprietary models available, while Meta Platforms often came in with “close enough” open source rivals — the difference this time is the company behind the hot model is based in China, the geopolitical ...