DeepSeek
What is DeepSeek-R1, the Chinese AI system that’s shaken the world, and what does it reveal about our future?
While DeepSeek has been around since 2023, what shocked the world was the release on 20 January of their DeepSeek-R1 AI model, a Large Language Model (LLM) that is just as intelligent as American giant OpenAI’s latest AI o1, but was far cheaper to create.
The increased efficiency comes from the artificial intelligence underlying R1. DeepSeek claims it only cost them a mere $6 million, while US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have spent more than ten times as much to create comparably smart AIs. DeepSeek’s success is due to many small engineering innovations – finding ways to get the same bang for much less buck using new techniques to allow the AI to learn more efficiently from its training data.
As for the improved reasoning capabilities of R1, these come from the same method underlying OpenAI’s newly released o1 model: leveraging so-called ‘reinforcement learning’ to teach AIs to better reason about their answers. This method takes an existing AI, and asks it to solve maths and computer science problems by reasoning through them. Since the answer to these questions can be checked by a program, it’s possible to automatically tell the AI on whether it succeeded or not, and to reward it for reasoning in ways that lead to correct answers.
This autonomous loop of improving its reasoning leads to R1 spending more time thinking before committing to an answer, and reaching what the DeepSeek researchers call ‘A-ha moments’: moments when R1 realises that it took the wrong approach to a problem, and then starts from scratch in a more fruitful direction.
You can read the full version of this piece by
in The Spectator!Link: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/deepseek-shows-the-stakes-for-humanity-couldnt-be-higher/
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