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Why DeepSeek had to be open source
Why DeepSeek had to be open-source (and why it won't defeat OpenAI) By now, you’ve heard of DeepSeek. It’s the Chinese AI lab that trained R1, an open-source reasoning model as good as OpenAI’s o1, but trained on inferior hardware for a fraction of the price.
On the surface, it goes against every business textbook you’ve read: If you innovate to build a market-leading product at a fraction of the cost, you should exploit that advantage. It’s a Chinese company, which probably makes businesses feel uneasy about building with them, especially when you start to deal with customer data—and even more so when you want to be HIPAA compliant or SOC2-certified. It’s precisely because DeepSeek has to deal with export control on cutting-edge chips like Nvidia H100s and GB10s that they had to find more efficient ways of training models.
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