DeepSeek’s impact on the Landscape of Large Language Models
Deepseek’s introduction in late January caused waves in the tech community and marked a significant disruption in the landscape of large language models (LLMs). Its development by a Chinese company for a fraction of the cost of similar models for just $6 million gained garnered significant media coverage, with its high performance and cost efficiency posing a significant rival to the established players on the market such as OpenAI and Nvidia. Its important to review what it’s introduction could mean for the future of LLMs and how this may benefit your business, aswell as the implications that need to be considered.
The emergence of DeepSeek main impact upon the LLM and the AI market was the demonstration that the high performance of LLMs can be developed and achieved with far fewer resources than previously thought necessary. Unlike it’s closer competitors, DeepSeek achieved benchmark scores rivalling leading models despite export restrictions forcing it to be trained on less optimal hardware. This therefore presents the possibility of setting a new standard of cost effective AI development. When compared to Open-AI’s GPT=4 and Meta’s LLaMa, DeepSeek stood out for its performance and cost-efficiency, with GPT-4 requiring significantly more computational resources. However, DeepSeek has been criticised for its handling of data privacy and security, with there being far more opaque data handling practices to other LLMs
A further disruptive impact of DeepSeek was it’s political implications. It underscored China’s influence on the AI sector and the challenge to Western and in particular US hegemony on the AI landscape. It’s development and impact supported industry expert Kai-Fu Lee’s view on the strategic importance of AI in global power dynamics and it’s strategic importance, as China was able to develop a similar model despite the technological embargoes previously mentioned.
The high performance of DeepSeek and it’s efficiency compared to other models provides a number of benefits when you and your business decided to use it. DeepSeek offers an automation engine which can eliminate many previously manual workflows such as invoice processing and customer ticket routing, with research showing it can reduce costs by up to 40%. This will enable your business to maximise ROI and maintain your high quality services. This will inturn enhance productivity within your workforce, with human employees being freed up to focus on more complex tasks.
You should also be aware of the particular drawbacks to DeepSeek. Unlike other AI models which prioritise security with end to end encryption features, DeepSeeks development in a country with far more opaque data laws, practices and views on privacy cause dilemmas for those choosing to use the service. SMEs that decide to use DeepSeek must exercise extra caution when using this LLM to ensure your practices comply with data protection regulations. DeepSeek is also no exception to other LLMs with the risk of biased or incorrect responses aswell as reliability when generating responses. When using LLM, you must always maintain a regular audit process to mitigate these risks and ensure you are continuing to produce high quality responses.
