DeepSeek and Its Impact on the Generative AI Global Race

DeepSeek and Its Impact on the Generative AI Global Race

Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd., doing business as DeepSeek, is a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company that develops large language models (LLMs). Based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, DeepSeek is owned and funded by the Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer.

DeepSeek utilizes reinforcement learning, meaning the model learns complex reasoning behaviors through reinforcement without supervised fine-tuning, which allows it to save significant computational resources.

What has happened since DeepSeek launched?

Although the quickness and purported cost-effectiveness of this launch stunned American tech companies, DeepSeek’s entry has not been without controversy.

There are many unanswered problems, including security, data privacy, Chinese censorship, potential intellectual property breaches, and the actual cost of its equipment.

Legal Issues for Copyright and Data Protection

OpenAI and Microsoft are investigating whether DeepSeek used OpenAI’s API to integrate their AI models into DeepSeek’s own models.

Deepseek, which leverages artificial intelligence for advanced data extraction and content discovery, are at the forefront of this revolution. While these tools promise efficiency and deeper insights, they also raise complex legal questions, particularly when dealing with copyrighted materials.

Integrating a product like DeepSeek that stores data in a foreign jurisdiction could violate data protection rules and expose sensitive information to unauthorized access for anyone managing client information and payment details.

Given that DeepSeek has yet to provide its privacy policies, industry experts and security researchers advise using extreme caution with sensitive information in DeepSeek.

DeepSeek Security Breach

Wiz Research, a company specializing in cloud security, announced it was able to hack DeepSeek and expose security risks with relative ease on Jan. 29.

Wiz alerted the DeepSeek team, and they took immediate action to secure the data. However, it is unclear who else accessed or downloaded the data before it was secured.

National Security Concerns Similar to TikTok

DeepSeek is sparking national security concerns in the U.S., over fears that its AI models could be used by the Chinese government to spy on American civilians, learn proprietary secrets, and wage influence campaigns.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the National Security Council was “looking into” the potential security implications of DeepSeek.

Chinese Censorship

DeepSeek’s censorship is present for queries deemed sensitive by the Chinese government, according to a Wired investigation.

However, because it is open source, there are ways of getting around the censorship, but it’s difficult.

It requires running your own servers using modified versions of the publicly available DeepSeek code, which means that you need access to several highly advanced GPUs to run the most powerful version of R1.

Questions About Cost

Initial claims by DeepSeek were that it took under USD 6 million to build based on the rental price of Nvidia’s GPUs.

DeepSeek’s hardware spend was higher than USD 500 million, along with additional R&D costs – as per a report from SemiAnalysis, which is a semiconductor research and consulting firm.

Even if DeepSeek did cost USD 500 million or more, it still cut costs compared to what leading competitors are spending.

DeepSeek was able to reduce costs, most notably by using a method called “mixture of experts.”

Instead of creating one neural network that learned data patterns on the internet, they split the system into many neural networks and launched smaller “expert” systems paired with a “generalist” system, reducing the amount of data needed to travel between GPU chips.

Implications of Being Open Source

DeepSeek-R1 is as “open-source” as any LLM has been thus far, which means anyone can download, use, or modify its code.

DeepSeek is a big step toward democratizing AI, allowing smaller companies and developers to build on DeepSeek-R1 and achieve greater AI feats faster. This could lead to more innovation in places with more limited access to the tech needed to build AI solutions.

But, critics fear that open-source models can expose security vulnerabilities that could be exploited, which we’ve already seen in DeepSeek’s first weeks in the public.

DeepSeek and the Future of SEO

DeepSeek is just the next splashy AI chatbot with search capabilities in the rapidly changing world of SEO.

DeepSeek and ChatGPT use advanced natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, but they still simply provide answers to real questions that real people ask.

Their responses heavily focus on semantic understanding, intent matching, and contextual analysis, but they ultimately serve the same core user need.

Final Thoughts

Whether DeepSeek will stick and grow in prominence remains to be seen.

If other governments follow Australia, Italy, and potentially the U.S. to ban DeepSeek, that would limit its growth potential.

Similar to how DeepSeek quickly gained recognition by offering a model for others and drastically reducing expenses, a new, game-changing AI might always be on the horizon.

As SEO experts, we must be ready to evaluate a plethora of new platforms and decipher how they respond to user inquiries