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Meet DeepSeek: the Chinese start-up that is changing how AI models are trained
Chinese start-up DeepSeek has emerged as “the biggest dark horse” in the open-source large language model (LLM) arena in 2025, just days after the firm made waves in the global artificial intelligence (AI) community with its latest release.
That assessment came from Jim Fan, a senior research scientist at Nvidia and lead of its AI Agents Initiative, in a New Year’s Day post on social-media platform X, following the Hangzhou-based start-up’s release last week of its namesake LLM, DeepSeek V3.
“[The new AI model] shows that resource constraints force you to reinvent yourself in spectacular ways,” Fan wrote, referring to how DeepSeek developed the product at a fraction of the capital outlay that other tech companies invest in building LLMs.
DeepSeek V3 comes with 671 billion parameters and was trained in around two months at a cost of US$5.58 million, using significantly fewer computing resources than models developed by bigger tech firms such as Facebook parent Meta Platforms and ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
LLM refers to the technology underpinning generative AI services such as ChatGPT. In AI, a high number of parameters is pivotal in enabling an LLM to adapt to more complex data patterns and make precise predictions. 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.
DeepSeek’s development of a powerful LLM at less cost than what bigger companies spend shows how far Chinese AI firms have progressed, despite US sanctions that have largely blocked their access to advanced semiconductors used for training models.
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