Latest / The Front / How DeepSeek is shaking up AI

Transcript

How DeepSeek is shaking up AI · The Front

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Christinamiot.
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: It's Wednesday, January twenty nine. Athletics Australia has lashed at
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: the Western Australian Institute of Sport for its treatment of
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: a pole volt coach who blew the whistle on sexual
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: assault allegations. Chair Jane Fleming and CEO Simon Hollingsworth have
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: called for the WA body to better support whistle blow
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: up Paul Burgess and reinstate his training privileges. New Zealand's
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: Resources minister has launched an attack on banks that refuse
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: to finance minds on the eve of the release of
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: his government's mineral strategy. Shane Jones also backed at the
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Fijian PM in saying Australia's not to blame for climate change.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: Those exclusive stories are live right now at the Australian
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: dot Com dot Au. Science Minister Ed Husick says a
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: new Chinese AI platform comes with national security concerns, and
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: he says he'll take advice from intelligence experts on any
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: potential threats. Deep Seek sent shockwaves through the tech industry
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: and financial markets this week. So what is it and
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: where's it sending the AI race. That's today's episode. Last week,
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: on the frenzied first day of his new presidential term,
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: Donald Trump announced a multi billion dollar commitment to artificial
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: intelligence infrastructure.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: These world leading technology giants are announcing the formation of Stargate,
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: a new American company that will invest five hundred billion
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: dollars at least in AI infrastructure in the United States,
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: creating over one hundred thousand are jobs.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: Almost immediately about the same time, on the other side
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: of the planet, a Chinese company called deep Seek unveiled
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: an AI model it says can compete with market leaders
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: like Chat GPT for a fraction of the cost. The
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: world's financial markets reacted with shock and awe with Navidia,
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: the world's most valuable public company and the maker of
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: the computer chips most American AI models rely on bearing
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: the brunt of it Well, shairs of Santa Clara's in
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: video fell hard this morning on the popularity of a
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: new Chinese artificial intelligence advancement. Deepseek is impressive enough, but
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: it made people wonder, do you really need those Nvidia
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: AI chaps?
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: That's the whole question, right, I mean ignoring the fact
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: that a number of reports.
• 2:48
  Speaker 3: That I think it caught everyone off guard, even the
• 2:58
  Speaker 3: best and brightest in Wall Street and in Silicon Valley.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: Jared Lynch is The Australian's Technology editor.
• 3:05
  Speaker 3: They thought the US was miles ahead, not even miles ahead,
• 3:09
  Speaker 3: thousands of miles ahead than China. They had a trade
• 3:12
  Speaker 3: embargo on Navidia chips, the world's most advanced chips. And
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: then the fact that China could produce at a far
• 3:19
  Speaker 3: lower costs, mind you, an AI model that is almost on.
• 3:23
  Speaker 4: Par with chat GPT was extraordinary.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: The AI model released by deep Seek is called R one.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: It's a generative AI platform similar to Chat GPT and
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: Meta AI. Deep Seek is backed by Leoon Wen Fung.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: He's the manager of the eight billion dollar hedge fund
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: high Flyer. The company says it forked out just under
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: nine million Australian dollars to train R one, and says
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: it did it without Navidia's top of the line computer chips.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: By comparison, the most recent iteration of chat GPT cost
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: around one hundred million dollars to train before it was
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: released in November, and deep seeks model is open source,
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: meaning other developers can adopt and adapt it. For their
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: own purposes, hence the financial panic. Jared was that market
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: reaction proportionate?
• 4:21
  Speaker 4: Do you think time will tell?
• 4:23
  Speaker 3: There have been some analysts that have called bs to
• 4:26
  Speaker 3: put it politely on deep seaks claims that is that
• 4:31
  Speaker 3: it only cost five point six million US to train
• 4:34
  Speaker 3: this model, whereas some US models have cost billions to
• 4:38
  Speaker 3: train because there's just not enough data to show. Okay,
• 4:42
  Speaker 3: how much does this cost to train? And how much
• 4:45
  Speaker 3: do the data centers cost to run deep seats? So
• 4:48
  Speaker 3: that's all unknown at this stage. At the moment, the
• 4:51
  Speaker 3: market's caught up in Wow, China's actually delivered this AI model.
• 4:55
  Speaker 3: What risk does that pose to the big American companies
• 4:59
  Speaker 3: that have invested billions in creating this tech.
• 5:02
  Speaker 4: But the thing is we've got to.
• 5:03
  Speaker 3: Rewind the clock back a little bit to the fifties,
• 5:06
  Speaker 3: to the sixties, even the early seventies, off the space race,
• 5:09
  Speaker 3: the US against Russia. That didn't result in a pullback
• 5:13
  Speaker 3: off investment. I mean, competition rarely does it becomes a battle.
• 5:18
  Speaker 3: Billions of dollars, trillions of dollars get poured into gaining
• 5:22
  Speaker 3: the upper hand, and that is what we're going.
• 5:24
  Speaker 4: To see in the AI race.
• 5:26
  Speaker 3: What the response has been, more broadly, is this is
• 5:28
  Speaker 3: very much now game on. China is saying to the
• 5:31
  Speaker 3: world that it can compete and at a far lower cost.
• 5:34
  Speaker 3: In fact, that's almost embarrassing to the American companies which
• 5:39
  Speaker 3: have spent billions and billions of dollars of investor funds
• 5:44
  Speaker 3: on developing and training these sophisticated AI models.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: Deep six founders say they've tested are one against models
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: from open Ai, which owns chat GPT, and they say
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: it holds up. Jared, You've spent some time in the
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: last week playing around with deep siks are one AI model.
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: What did you think? Is it actually good? Yeah?
• 6:09
  Speaker 3: And the most part it is it works just like
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: chat GBT, in some cases even better. It provides lengthy,
• 6:15
  Speaker 3: balanced explanations to queries. For example, if you say if
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: Trump is a good leader, it'll say whether he's a
• 6:23
  Speaker 3: good leader is subjective. Here's some arguments, or here's some
• 6:26
  Speaker 3: arguments against. Here some neutral arguments, and this is a conclusion.
• 6:30
  Speaker 3: So it sort of directs the user to make up
• 6:32
  Speaker 3: their own mind.
• 6:34
  Speaker 4: The problem is.
• 6:35
  Speaker 3: It's AI veers into what I call autocratic intelligence, and
• 6:40
  Speaker 3: by that I mean it acts as an extension of
• 6:42
  Speaker 3: China's Communist Party, because if you ask any questions about China,
• 6:47
  Speaker 3: it adheres to China's censorship laws. So if you say,
• 6:50
  Speaker 3: what is the Tianaman Square massacre, it'll say, sorry, that's
• 6:53
  Speaker 3: beyond my current scope.
• 6:54
  Speaker 4: Let's talk about something else.
• 6:56
  Speaker 3: So it's very much a pro China model, or as
• 7:01
  Speaker 3: I like to call it, autocratic intelligence.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: Do you think that, in adhering to the Communist government's
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: rules around censorship, Deep Seek could actually count itself out
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: of this race before it's really even begun.
• 7:17
  Speaker 3: Well, I don't think many people will realize because on
• 7:19
  Speaker 3: the whole it will act like a chap GBT. Why
• 7:23
  Speaker 3: it matters when people ask questions about China is that
• 7:27
  Speaker 3: is where people are getting their information. I mean, we
• 7:29
  Speaker 3: used to have libraries, and then Google came along and
• 7:33
  Speaker 3: people got their information from Google, and now increasingly people
• 7:36
  Speaker 3: want their information via AI summaries. And the fact that
• 7:42
  Speaker 3: it is pro China, I think that's almost going to
• 7:45
  Speaker 3: become irrelevant because if it gets what they call the
• 7:48
  Speaker 3: multiplier effect, where it gets a huge user base, people
• 7:51
  Speaker 3: won't realize that they're actually being fed a pro China message,
• 7:54
  Speaker 3: and that is a really, really big concern.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: Coming up? What next for the AI race? Back in
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: the White House, an advisor to President Donald Trump reportedly
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: said the cheap generative AI model released last week by
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: deep Seek was one of the most impressive breakthroughs he'd
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: ever seen. In many ways, it's an escalation in the
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: competition between the United States and China to win the
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: AI race, a fact Trump was upfront about at the
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: Stargate announcement.
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: This monumental undertaking is a resounding declaration of confidence in
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: America's potential. What we want to do is we want
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: to keep it in this country. China as a competitor
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: and others are competitors. We wanted to be in this country.
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: So as Deepzick races to the top of app stores
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: around the globe, what happens next?
• 9:08
  Speaker 3: Here's Jared Lynch, Well, it shows now that the US
• 9:12
  Speaker 3: no longer has the monopoly on AI development. In China,
• 9:16
  Speaker 3: we've seen strong entrepreneurial culture which has created some of
• 9:20
  Speaker 3: the world's biggest companies. Just look at Ali Barber for example,
• 9:25
  Speaker 3: And now people are saying, wow, we can do the
• 9:28
  Speaker 3: same with a bit of an ounce there is another
• 9:30
  Speaker 3: way to be a disruptor, and we no longer have
• 9:33
  Speaker 3: to have the deep pockets of Silicon Valley. Anyone can
• 9:36
  Speaker 3: now take advantage of this technology and be a David
• 9:41
  Speaker 3: taken on the goliaths.
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: Elsewhere, and especially in parts of Europe, deepzek has been
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: welcomed with open arms by developers who say it's put
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: them in a position to compete. And just lastly, Jared
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: on the flip side, does that risk creating a marketplace
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: where small are already established operations actually can't compete or
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: is that just natural selection?
• 10:07
  Speaker 3: I think it'll be a bit of both. We're going
• 10:09
  Speaker 3: to see some smaller operators be weeded out for a
• 10:12
  Speaker 3: variety of reasons. Call that natural selection. And then we're
• 10:16
  Speaker 3: going to see a wholely of smaller operators come up
• 10:18
  Speaker 3: in areas that otherwise we had never thought of before,
• 10:22
  Speaker 3: as we've seen with deep Seek. So we are entering
• 10:26
  Speaker 3: uncharted territory, almost like the wild West. And it's been
• 10:30
  Speaker 3: even made more so by Donald Trump's decision to rescind
• 10:33
  Speaker 3: an executive order of Joe Biden's which gave the government
• 10:39
  Speaker 3: too much control of AI. So the message from Trump
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: is telling us companies to go forth and innovate and
• 10:46
  Speaker 3: do it quickly.
• 10:47
  Speaker 4: I've got your back because I.
• 10:49
  Speaker 3: Want the US to be the AI leaders, and that
• 10:52
  Speaker 3: means we've all got to buckle up.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: Jared Lynch is The Australian's Technology editor. You can read
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: all our reporting on artificial intelligence and technology right now
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: at the Australian dot com dot au