New Business
DeepSeek lowers cost of AI adoption for businesses across Southeast Asia: experts
DeepSeek’s advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models have lowered the cost of adopting the technology for Southeast Asia’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), according to experts, although many businesses still must contend with a lack of talent and outdated digital infrastructure.
“I think this [development] is quite a good thing for SMEs in Malaysia,” Leo Liu Binxing, vice-president of international business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said in a panel discussion at the China Conference: Southeast Asia 2025 event hosted by the South China Morning Post in Kuala Lumpur on Monday.
“These start-ups can get going [with] very, very low cost to pursue innovation.”
With access to powerful models provided through cloud services, start-ups will “only need to focus on their ideas”, Liu said. Alibaba Cloud Intelligence is a unit of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the Post.
That positive assessment reflects the worldwide attention gained by start-up DeepSeek over the past few weeks for releasing two advanced open-source AI models, V3 and R1, at a fraction of the cost and computing power that major tech companies typically require for large language model (LLM) projects.
LLM is the technology underpinning generative AI services like ChatGPT and DeepSeek’s namesake chatbot. Open source gives public access to a software program’s source code, allowing third-party developers to modify or share its design, fix broken links or scale up its capabilities.
Source link
