DeepSeek AI: Success Against Adversities

How often do you hear people complaining about the absence of certain conveniences and facilities that is holding up their progress, peace and happiness? However, the story of a young techie from China who has stunned the world with his AI startup 'DeepSeek', is a solid lesson of innovation and application of mind. It reminds me of the advertisement by a telecom company that stated "An idea can change your life". In fact, DeepSeek's entry has served as an inspiration to India, to create such economically affordable AI models.

In a disclosure that stunned the world and shook up the high end attitude of the Silicon Valley; DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup founded by 39-year-old, Liang Wenfeng, has emerged as a formidable player in the Artificial Intelligence landscape. DeepSeek has developed an AI model which requires significantly reduced data and at a fraction of the cost. This development has sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley and the global tech community.

DeepSeek is also a case of adversities bringing the best out of you. All because the U.S. put export restrictions on semiconductors to China, the Chinese tech fraternity was forced to be innovative to find out alternatives—and it succeeded. As mentioned on Wikipedia - "The debut of DeepSeek's AI assistant, utilising the V3 model, quickly surpassed OpenAI's ChatGPT as the highest-rated free app on the iOS App Store in the United States. Its chatbot demonstrated capabilities in answering questions, solving logic problems, and writing computer programs on par with other market-leading chatbots. This achievement has been recognised as potentially challenging the global dominance of American AI models."

While the Central Government is gung-ho about the potential of such Indian AI models, a techie geek has tweeted about what stops India from such innovation. He tweeted in a series of tweet and all of which mentioned here: “LLM building is nothing that Indian engineers living in India cannot pull off. Don’t worry about Indians who have left. There are plenty in the country as of today. Then why India does not have foundation models? It is for the same reason India does not have Google or Facebook of its own.

"You need to able to walk before you can run. There is no protected market to practice your craft in early days. You will get replaced by American service providers as they are cheaper and better every single time. That is not the case with Chinese players."

"They have a protected market, and leadership who treats this skillset as existential due to geopolitics. So, even if Chinese models are not good in early days, they will continue to get funding from their conglomerates as well as provincial governments. Darwinian competition ensures best rise to the top."

Recall, DeepSeek took two years to get here without much revenue. They were funded by their parent. Also, most of their engineers are not PhDs. There is nothing that engineers who built Ola, Swiggy, Flipkart, cannot build. Remember, these services are second to none when you compare them to their Bay Area counterparts. Also, don’t trivialise those services; there is brilliant engineering to make them work at the price points at which they work."

"What we need is a mentality that treats this skillset as existential. We need a national fund that will fund such teams, and the only expected output will be the benchmark performance, with benchmarks becoming harder every six months. No revenue needed to survive for first three years. That money will be loose change for GOI and world’s richest men living in India.”

Remember how Linux has presented a significant challenge to Microsoft by offering a free, open-source operating system alternative to Windows, particularly in the server market, where Linux is often seen as more reliable and cost-effective, forcing Microsoft to adapt its pricing and strategies to compete with the growing popularity of Linux.

An idea, can indeed change your life and the life of the nation.