OpenAI is losing its edge: Why DeepSeek hasn’t? The tech-technical transition underway in the US, according to Bloomberg
The rise of DeepSeek may indicate that the US has lost its edge in artificial intelligence. A number of experts, including the executives at companies that build and customization some of the world’s most powerful frontier AI models, say that it is a sign of a different kind of technological transition underway.
DeepSeek’s technology was developed by a lab in China, which sprang out of one of the country’s best-performing quantitative hedge funds. A research paper that was posted in December claimed that the previous DeepSeek-V3 large language model cost just $5.6 million, a fraction of the amount its competitors needed for similar projects. OpenAI said that some models cost up to $100 million each. The new models from Open Artificial Intelligence, Meta, and Anthropic likely cost a lot more.
OpenAI and Microsoft are investigating whether the Chinese rival used OpenAI’s API to integrate OpenAI’s AI models into DeepSeek’s own models, according to Bloomberg. The outlet’s sources said Microsoft security researchers detected that large amounts of data were being exfiltrated through OpenAI developer accounts in late 2024, which the company believes are affiliated with DeepSeek.
The situation is rich with irony. The GPT model of OpenAI made a lot of leaps, when it took down the entire written web without consent.