A Chinese Company Upended OpenAI. We May Be Looking at the Story All Wrong.

Machines Like Us

When the American company OpenAI released ChatGPT, it was the first time that a lot of people had ever interacted with Generative AI. ChatGPT has become so popular that, for many, it’s now synonymous with artificial intelligence.

But that may be changing. Earlier this year a Chinese startup called DeepSeek launched its own AI chatbot, sending shockwaves across Silicon Valley. According to DeepSeek, their model – DeepSeek-R1 – is just as powerful as ChatGPT but was developed at a fraction of the cost. In other words, this isn’t just a new company, it could be an entirely different approach to building artificial intelligence.

To try and understand what DeepSeek means for the future of AI, and for American innovation, I wanted to speak with Karen Hao. Hao was the first reporter to ever write a profile on OpenAI and has covered AI for The MIT Tech Review, The Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal. So she’s better positioned than almost anyone to try and make sense of this seemingly monumental shift in the landscape of artificial intelligence.

Mentioned:

“The messy, secretive reality behind OpenAI’s bid to save the world,” by Karen Hao

Further Reading:

“DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning,” by DeepSeek-AI and others.

“A Comparison of DeepSeek and Other LLMs,” by Tianchen Gao, Jiashun Jin, Zheng Tracy Ke, Gabriel Moryoussef

“Technical Report: Analyzing DeepSeek-R1′s Impact on AI Development,” by Azizi Othman