Home DeepSeek R1 makes a splash as free ChatGPT competitor upends AI world

DeepSeek R1 makes a splash as free ChatGPT competitor upends AI world

DeepSeek, a new generative AI chatbot, has taken the artificial intelligence community by storm since it launched last week. The Chinese-made ChatGPT competitor has ruffled feathers as it can compete with OpenAI’s flagship o1 model and allegedly cost a fraction of the US-based AI to develop.

While the benchmarks and real-world testing since DeepSeek lit a fire under the AI world, the cost of operations has been questioned. Companies like Microsoft and Meta have spent billions of dollars training and working on AI, with both companies set to spend more than $65 billion through 2025.

However, DeepSeek claims to have created an o1-level model that operates at 95% of the cost. If o1 costs $15 per million input tokens and $60 per million output tokens (one token is about 4 characters), DeepSeek is estimated to cost around $0.55 and $2.19 per million input and output tokens, respectively.

The other side of this is that DeepSeek has made R1 open source. Nvidia Senior Research Manager, Dr. Jim Fan, said that it is “keeping the original mission of OpenAI alive”. OpenAI was originally intended as a non-profit organization to advance digital intelligence to benefit the whole of humanity. The Sam Altman-led company is now a for-profit company.

Fan also praised the development of the DeepSeek AI. By being open source, it will allow developers to poke around and learn from DeepSeek, or potentially improve it.

New free DeepSeek R1 AI could change landscape

DeepSeek is also entirely free to use right now, aside from handing over data by logging in. In 2023, a leaked Google document claimed that open-source alternatives to the major players’ options would outcompete them.

There’s a real possibility that if DeepSeek manages to catch on with the wider public – the app is already top on iOS – OpenAI and others would need to consider dropping their prices. Currently, OpenAI charges a maximum of $200 a month for its top-end models.

Some researchers are now claiming that DeepSeek isn’t infallible, and that benchmarks aren’t the best measure of success. In some of the tougher reasoning benchmarks, DeepSeek struggles to outpace the o1-mini, a more restricted version of the flagship model. On Reddit, some users stated that DeepSeek’s work in efficiency should still be studied.

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Joel Loynds
Tech Journalist

Joel Loynd’s obsession with uncovering bad games and even worse hardware so you don’t have to has led him on this path. Since the age of six, he’s been poking at awful games and oddities from his ever-expanding Steam library. He’s been writing about video games since 2008, writing for sites such as WePC and PC Guide, as well as covering gaming for Scan Computers, More recently Joel was Dexerto’s E-Commerce and Deputy Tech Editor, delving deep into the exploding handheld market and covering the weird and wonderful world of the latest tech.

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