TechCheck Takes: Why China’s DeepSeek is putting America’s AI lead in jeopardy 1/27/25

TechCheck

CNBC

Disruptors, Investing, Faang, Technology, Business, Management, Cnbc, Tech

4.8 • 56 Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

An AI lab out of China has ignited panic throughout Silicon Valley after releasing AI models that can outperform America’s best despite being built more cheaply and with less-powerful chips. DeepSeek unveiled a free, open-source large-language model in late December that it says took only two months and less than $6 million to build. CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa interviews Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas and explains why the DeepSeek has raised alarms on whether America’s global lead in AI is shrinking.

Transcript

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0:00.0	China's latest AI breakthrough has leapfrogged the world.
0:04.3	I think we should take the development out of China very, very seriously.
0:07.9	A game-changing move that does not come from Open AI, Google, or meta.
0:13.2	There is a new model that has all of the valley buzzing.
0:16.9	But from a Chinese lab called DeepSeek.
0:20.0	It's opened a lot of eyes of like what is actually happening in AI in China.
0:24.6	What took Google and open AI years and hundreds of millions of dollars to build?
0:29.6	DeepSeek says took it just two months and less than $6 million.
0:34.6	They have the best open source model and all the American developers are building on that.
0:39.0	I'm Deer Jibosa with the tech check take.
0:41.8	China's AI breakthrough.
0:44.2	It was a technological leap that shocked Silicon Valley, a newly unveiled free open source
0:50.2	AI model that beat some of the most powerful ones on the market.
0:54.2	But it wasn't a new launch from Open AI or model announcement from Anthropic.
0:58.5	This one was built in the east by a Chinese research lab called DeepSeek.
1:03.6	And the details behind its development stunned top AI researchers here in the US.
1:08.5	First the cost.
1:09.5	The AI lab reportedly spent just $5.6 million to
1:12.8	build DeepSeek version 3. Compare that to Open AI, which is spending $5 billion a year.
1:18.7	And Google, which expects capital expenditures in 2024 to soar to over $50 billion.
1:24.7	And then there's Microsoft that sheld out more than $13 billion just to invest in
1:29.5	open AI. But even more stunning, how deep-seek scrappier model was able to outperform the lavishly
	...

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