By all accounts, the world is currently in the midst of a global AI arms race. In this race, the players comprise both business entities and the countries that are home to them. Gauging by the liberal use of the word \"safety\" in all of the conversations surrounding AI, the potential implications for humanity (particularly if things go wrong) could be significant. While the stakes could be sky-high, the notion of there being a \"hype\" connotation to this race cannot be wished away – particularly when it comes to the vast sums of money, funding, and investment being spoken of in lay conversation by involved persons. There are two reasons for this cloud of doubt about the (monetary) cost of AI, and they also help to give that cloud a range – from about $6 million to $500 billion.
The argument for the $6 million corner comes from China, and has warped both the AI power rankings as well as the hitherto understood means to success. DeepSeek, an unheralded AI lab based in Hangzhou of China's Zhejiang Province, has gone viral in app stores and on AI business and social media circles following the release of the DeepThink R1 reasoning mode in its AI chatbot application. In the rarefied and ever-changing atmosphere of technical chatbot-vs-chatbot comparisons, where versions, numbers, and decimals can make people wish that AI looks itself in a mirror, the DeepSeek R1's \"reasoning\" can make a deeply impressive argument. It tells you how it thinks, and to a layperson who doesn't know the difference between compute tokens and crypto tokens, it definitely comes across as eye-opening and organically intelligent. That this endeavor by DeepSeek has only cost it in the range of $6 million (as per CNBC as well as in prevalent media discussion) has shaken up the industry.
While more will undoubtedly come to be known about DeepSeek in the coming future, the comparison is clear and the implications are already being drawn out. This lab in China is said to have trained on just a fraction of the resources used by leading U.S. companies in the field, like OpenAI which began the generative AI revolution as we know it with the launch of ChatGPT just about two years ago. Nvidia, which used to be a gaming graphics card (GPU) maker but has now become among the most valuable companies in the world by becoming the sole gold mine of sorts for AI chips, only had a modest contribution to DeepSeek's success. The comparatively limited number of Nvidia's H100 chips used by DeepSeek is a fly in the face of bids in the U.S. to build AI supercomputer clusters comprising hundreds of thousands of more advanced Nvidia chips.
Reference(s):
Million? Billion? Trillion? China's DeepSeek sparks AI costs debate
cgtn.com
