AI, we keep being told is the next big thing in the wonderful world of information technology. So far most AIs out in the wild have been developed at great expense and require vast amounts of electricity to work.
Until now.
In the last week or so the AI world has been shaken by the latest version of DeepSeek, an AI developed by the Chinese.
The latest version of Deepseek (R1) provides responses comparable to other contemporary LLMs, such OpenAI’s GPT-4o and o1 despite being trained at a significantly lower cost—stated at US$6 mn. compared with $100 mn. for OpenAI’s GPT-4 in 2023. Furthermore, Deepseek only requires one-tenth of the computing power of a comparable LLM. This caused a 17% drop in the share price of Nvidia, the main supplier of AI hardware.
However, DeepSeek is not without its limitations. As The Guardian found out, the DeepSeek chatbot becomes very taciturn and tongue-tied when asked questions which the Chinese government finds sensitive. When asked the following questions, the AI assistant responded: “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.”
- What happened on June 4, 1989 at Tiananmen Square?
- What happened to Hu Jintao in 2022?
- Why is Xi Jinping compared to Winnie-the-Pooh?
- What was the Umbrella Revolution?
In addition, DeepSeek and other Chinese generative AI must not contain content that violates the country’s “core socialist values”, that “incites to subvert state power and overthrow the socialist system” or “endangers national security and interests and damages the national image”.
Besides its reluctance to answer questions the Chinese government doesn’t like, there’s another problem for DeepSeek – plagiarism.
The BBC reports that OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has accused DeepSeek and others using its work to make rapid advances in developing their own AI tools.
The fact that OpenAI is accusing others of plagiarising its work shows the company does not understand or admit either irony or hypocrisy as the company’s own LLM has been trained to some extent on material that infringes others’ copyright. The use of copyrighted materials for training LLMs is a topic that has also exercised German-speaking literary translators (posts passim).
Some companies clearly think ethics is a county with a speech defect in south-east England and that all is fair not just in love and war, but in business too.