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Irish scientists comment on DeepSeek, a new AI Chatbot.
Dr Christopher Baker, Research Fellow, School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen’s University Belfast, said:
“DeepSeek-R1, developed by a Chinese company, has emerged as a direct competitor to OpenAI’s language models. While its market performance is still under evaluation, the model’s release carries significant geopolitical implications. DeepSeek’s development philosophy emphasises efficiency through a “less is more” approach, substantially reducing hardware requirements compared to its competitors. This is particularly noteworthy given Nvidia’s dominant position in AI-focused GPU manufacturing and recent US sanctions restricting China’s access to these specialized chips. DeepSeek-R1’s recent market entry has caused significant market disruption, challenging what was effectively a US-based monopoly in the AI language model sector. This unexpected development has triggered a substantial shift in market valuations and is reshaping the competitive landscape for large language models.
Queen’s University Belfast stands at the forefront of AI innovation, drawing on decades of research expertise to evaluate emerging technologies for the benefit of students, industry partners, and government stakeholders. Our agile approach enables us to adapt swiftly to changes in the information economy, maximising the potential benefits for Northern Ireland’s community. We embrace the growing competition in AI development while maintaining our commitment to shape policy and guide the responsible implementation of these technologies across the United Kingdom.”
Prof Stuart Elborn, Professor of Medicine and Deputy Vice Chancellor, Queen’s University Belfast, said:
“DeepSeek is a welcome and disruptive tool into the artificial intelligence sector. It has been built from bottom-up with numerous innovations to make it more efficient, less costly and at least as accurate as current systems. It is also much more open in terms of using and modifying some of the algorithms and language models though it is not fully open source as the training data has not yet been made available. It has been published under a licence with Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT). It works particularly well performing tasks related to chemistry and mathematics. DeepSeek’s large language model out performed the other systems while being built for around $ 6 million to train the model compared to $60 million for some of its comparators. The DeepSeek system uses less computer power by innovating with its approach to algorithm evaluation. As with all new entries in this market it will need to be tested but this looks like a low-cost, accessible and highly functional artificial intelligence tool and is a welcome addition particularly for researchers.”
Dr Deepak Padmanabhan, Senior Lecturer, School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen’s University Belfast, said:
“DeepSeek is causing massive disruption in financial markets. Mainstream narratives contrast the technology with ChatGPT and illustrate the differences in technological aspects. The far more long-reaching effect it would have would not be technological, it would be political, for it could disrupt the paradigms entrenched in the tech industry in substantive ways. There could be several aspects:
Open-Source Software: DeepSeek’s code to train AI models is open source. This means that anybody can download the code and use it to develop their own AI. This is a significant step towards democratisation of AI. The open-source availability of code for an AI that competes well with contemporary commercial models is a significant change. Yet, if one is to download and run the code to develop their own AI, they would still need to have access to large datasets and tremendous computational power – but this is nevertheless a massive step forward.
Computational Power: AI has been noted to pose massive computational requirements over the past decade leading to corporate dominance in AI research [ https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade2420 ]. With massive compute requirements yielding well to monopolisation of the space, big tech, and the government funding landscape (that are in turn influenced by big tech) have shown limited interests in prioritising AI research towards reducing computational requirements. DeepSeek’s models have been noted to require far lesser computational requirements than today’s commercial models. This could potentially ignite new interest in reducing computational requirements for future AI, with positive effects towards environment.
No plans for Commercialisation: It has been highlighted that DeepSeek has no plans for commercialisation [ https://www.chinatalk.media/p/deepseek-ceo-interview-with-chinas ]. This makes it a very interesting development in that this marks a moment when a player with qualitatively different ideas enters a commercially-dominated space. This is a change against the prevailing trends – OpenAI was noted as moving to a full commercial model (from a partly non-profit model) in recent times. It may be interesting how commercial players respond to this challenge.
In other words, the entry of DeepSeek could potentially hasten a paradigm shift in AI and pose a real challenge to commercial dominance in the sector. It may be a little too far to see this as a pathway towards taking AI into public hands, but that’s the direction of travel that DeepSeek brings to the table.
Cheaper AI, Pervasive AI: One of the potential first effects would be cheaper consumer AI, and a fall in the profit margins within the tech sector. But it could also accelerate disruption by making AI pervasive, bringing more sectors and more jobs under threat.
Cautious Optimism: It may be tempting to hope that open-source AI would lead to effects similar to what was seen in the 1990s when the dominance of Microsoft’s windows was challenged very well by open-source Linux. Yet, AI is not just software and computational resources – there is data too. So, there are further hurdles to overcome. We could view this development with optimism, but we must be cautious. For example, the ethos of the open-source movement was diluted with corporate players substantively entering the system leading to what has been called a ‘Corporate dominance in Open Source Ecosystems’ [ https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3540250.3549117 ]. To develop, sustain and strengthen open-source ethos within AI would require many more developments in the same direction as DeepSeek.”
Declarations of interest:
Dr Padmanabhan: None
For all other experts, no reply to our request for DOIs was received.