DeepSeek's success is a pivotal moment for AI democratization

As with the Jevons Paradox, efficiency gains should result in increased AI use globally as costs drop

- JASPREET BINDRA

The Center for AI Safety (CAIS) and Scale AI collaborated to create what they called 'Humanity's Last Exam,' a test stuffed with 3,000 PhD-level questions from mathematics, humanities and life sciences. A new Turing Test for the age of AI, only three models got scores close to 10%: OpenAI's model, Google's Gemini 2, and an unknown Chinese model called DeepSeek R1.

This Chinese model is far from unknown today. It has risen to the top spot on Apple's app store and single-handedly caused the Nasdaq to slip by 1.5% on a single day, with Nvidia, the bellwether of AI stocks, crashing 17%.

That DeepSeek's latest AI model performs almost as well as OpenAI's or Google's creations is not why it is being hailed as the second coming of AI. The reason is how little time and money it took. Built as a 'side project' by High Flyer, a Chinese hedge fund founded by Liang Wenfeng, it took just two months and $5.6 million, as opposed to the hundreds of millions spent by OpenAI and others. As claimed, it used last-generation H800 GPU chips, having been denied Nvidia's latest by US sanctions; it needed just 2,000 of them, compared to the 100,000 or so that big US models required.