What communicators should know about Chinese AI DeepSeek

On the surface, DeepSeek is an open-source large language model not unlike many that have been released over the last few years.

But there is one key difference: It’s from China.

That simple fact threw the entire AI sector into chaos and raised questions about the future of the industry. Here’s what communicators need to know:

DeepSeek is a high performing LLM released by a Chinese startup that is owned by High-Flyer, a Chinese stock trading firm. Its functionality is similar to products you’re familiar with, like ChatGPT or Copilot: It can write, do math, perform analyses and perform other tasks we’ve come to expect from gen AI. It’s all open source, like Meta’s Llama model, which means anyone can examine the code used to create it or even take the platform and create their own product.