DeepSeek stunned the AI industry earlier this year when it launched without any fanfare. Claiming to have only spent millions training it, the Chinese AI model proved it was capable of standing toe-to-toe with its Western counterparts, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Now, the company has announced an update to its DeepSeek R1 reasoning model.
Update to DeepSeek R1 model
According to a post on the official WeChat group, DeepSeek says it has updated the R1 AI model. The company describes the update as a “minor trial upgrade” and users can already start testing it. However, the company stopped short of saying what kind of changes it has made under the hood.
TechCrunch says the updated version of the model is available on the Hugging Face developer platform. However, this version has 685 billion parameters, making it a pretty hefty upgrade. The publication also notes that this particular version cannot run on consumer-grade hardware without modification.
If you are using DeepSeek, then maybe this could be an update worth checking out.
Concerns surrounding DeepSeek
That being said, DeepSeek isn’t without its controversies. Early research found that DeepSeek’s model is “dangerous.” This is because the AI was prone to manipulation, giving users inappropriate or dangerous answers if they knew how to phrase their questions. For instance, researchers found that DeepSeek could be tricked into generating malware on the fly.
Other than security issues, some AI companies, such as OpenAI, have accused DeepSeek of training its models using ChatGPT answers. We get where OpenAI is coming from, although it’s a bit rich given that the company itself has also been accused of training its AI models using content created by writers, journalists, and publishers, without express permission.
Also, while DeepSeek claimed it only spent millions training its model, that number has been disputed. Some believe that those figures only represent part of DeepSeek’s overall costs. For example, it has been pointed that the hardware alone used to power DeepSeek is not cheap. In total, it is estimated that DeepSeek probably spent $1.6 billion, making its initial claims rather misleading.
