DeepSeek’s success shows why motivation is key to AI innovation

January 2025 shook the AI landscape. The seemingly unstoppable OpenAI and the powerful American tech giants were shocked by what we can certainly call an underdog in the area of large language models (LLMs). DeepSeek, a Chinese firm not on anyone’s radar, suddenly challenged OpenAI. It is not that DeepSeek-R1 was better than the top models from American giants; it was slightly behind in terms of the benchmarks, but it suddenly made everyone think about the efficiency in terms of hardware and energy usage.

Given the unavailability of the best high-end hardware, it seems that DeepSeek was motivated to innovate in the area of efficiency, which was a lesser concern for larger players. OpenAI has claimed they have evidence suggesting DeepSeek may have used their model for training, but we have no concrete proof to support this. So, whether it is true or it’s OpenAI simply trying to ...