The rise of Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek is good news for the tech industry as it will stimulate greater creativity among developers, bring down costs, and enable more people to benefit from technological development, said a Chinese cyberspace expert on Thursday.
DeepSeek-R1, a new open-source AI model from the Hangzhou-based Chinese company, has rapidly gained global attention since its launch earlier this month, soaring to the top of Apple's app store's free charts by Monday, surpassing OpenAI's ChatGPT.
According to DeepSeek, in tasks such as mathematics, coding and natural language reasoning, the performance of this model is comparable to the leading models from heavyweights like OpenAI but only at a fraction of the cash and computing power of its competitors.
The sudden rise of DeepSeek also caused plunge in the stock prices of major tech companies, including Microsoft, Meta, and Nvidia, with a former Google CEO describing it as "a turning point" in the global AI race.
The U.S. Navy has banned the use of the AI model developed by the Chinese startup which has recently garnered global attention for its advanced abilities and low development cost, claiming the ban is due to "security and ethical concerns".
Others have also voiced concerns over the model's data and privacy management practices.
In an interview with China Global Television Network (CGTN), Gai Keke, a professor at School of Cyberspace Science and Technology of Beijing Institute of Technology, said that rather than isolating new technologies, it is crucial to harness their potential and foster international cooperation to address any vulnerabilities.
"We firstly need to understand how security and privacy are defined. So this concept is different for different countries, enterprises, and individuals. Meanwhile, any digital technology, as far as I know, have some potential vulnerabilities. So this is the why cybersecurity has become a topic of common concern to all countries around the world. I personally believe that's the key to the emergence of new technologies, is how people make good use of the technology rather than simply isolating or hindering it. As it has been proven rapidly during the intellectual revolution, advanced technologies will eventually replace older generation technologies. Therefore, I guess we should pay more attention to how to solve existing or potential threats, promote multi-party cooperation and develop technology together in order to perfect the technology for the benefits of [all] mankind," Gai said.
Microsoft, a major investor of DeepSeek's U.S. rival OpenAI, is also probing if the Chinese AI developer obtained data output from OpenAI in an unauthorized manner.
OpenAI told media outlets that they have evidence of DeepSeek using OpenAI's service to train their AI models, a behavior that's not allowed in OpenAI's terms of service.
But neither OpenAI nor Microsoft offered evidence.
Though the probe is ongoing, a nominated official from the Trump administration is already calling out DeepSeek for using "stolen" U.S. tech.
Commenting on such accusations, Gai said he believes that the two AI models are based on different technological paths, as the just-released model R1 has achieved an important technological breakthrough -- using pure deep learning methods to allow AI to spontaneously emerge with reasoning capabilities.
"Moreover, we all know that Open AI’s algorithm relies on a large amount of computing power and high quality data obtained from search engines, both of which are currently the best in the United States. If this is a simple copy work, logically it cannot be surpassed, right? Therefore, I believe that technically DeepSeek is different from Open AI. Meanwhile, I think having more competition in the AI field is good for users because this will stimulate greater creativity among developers, continually improve performance and reduce cost, let more people benefit from technological development," he said.
Rise of DeepSeek to benefit industry, users: expert
Rise of DeepSeek to benefit industry, users: expert
