DeepSeek Receives Strong Support from Developers
Efficiency and Cost-Effectiveness of AI Model Highlighted
"Public and Private Investment, Broad Business Development Needed"
The DeepSeek artificial intelligence (AI) model has recently recorded the highest number of downloads in the past month, gaining enthusiastic support from developers worldwide. As the need for cost-effective AI development is highlighted over astronomical-scale investments, both expectations and concerns coexist within the domestic AI industry.
According to the IT industry on the 3rd, the ‘R1’ model released by DeepSeek about two weeks ago has accumulated 840,000 downloads (as of the 3rd) on the global AI developer platform Hugging Face. The number of ‘likes’ has exceeded 6,000. The previous DeepSeek model ‘V3,’ released in December last year, had 870,000 downloads. DeepSeek’s AI models have become the most downloaded models on Hugging Face in the past month. Hugging Face is a site that helps developers utilize AI machine learning models with open-source code.
The high number of downloads of DeepSeek on the developer platform means that many developers are participating in improving DeepSeek. DeepSeek is an open-source AI model whose source code anyone can use. While OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, chose a closed development method without releasing source code, DeepSeek and Meta have adopted an open-source development approach. Open-source AI models have their operating principles, design methods, and algorithms all publicly available, allowing anyone to use them. This enables many developers to contribute to improving performance or fixing errors while utilizing open-source models. The open-source approach is also cited as the driving force behind DeepSeek’s rapid growth in a short time. In response, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has hinted at transitioning ChatGPT, which has been operated as a closed model, to open source.
Domestic AI companies express both expectations and concerns. In the short term, it can prevent the dominance of US big tech companies and broaden options, but in the long term, there are worries that it could lead to technological dependence on China. Park Jeong-ho, head of the Technology Research Institute at Newn AI with 20 years of experience, said, "The choices for companies creating AI agents using commercial large language models (LLMs) have expanded," adding, "Performance is similar or better than before, and costs have become cheaper." However, he predicted, "In the future, when receiving government support or investment, demands to ‘develop high-performance AI at lower costs’ may arise, making it difficult for companies." If public and private investments decrease due to this, the pace of technological development will slow down, eventually leading to dependence on China.
Jo Hyung-geun, Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) of AI infrastructure solution company ‘More,’ forecasted, "The market demand to easily develop AI by utilizing diverse and affordable graphics processing units (GPUs) will increase further." He suggested that national investment in AI infrastructure construction should be activated to prevent adverse effects that DeepSeek might bring to the market. Jo CSO said, "It could be problematic if specific AI models widely use overseas AI models, including those from China, to acquire confidential information of Korean users or companies," adding, "Broad and diverse investments and business development across the entire AI value chain must be carried out."
Meanwhile, due to a surge in users, the DeepSeek service is unstable. From the 31st of last month to the 1st of this month, there were repeated incidents where the site itself was inaccessible. DeepSeek’s official application (app) is also maintaining the top spot on the popularity chart. On the domestic Apple App Store’s popularity chart, DeepSeek has held the number one position among all apps for nearly a week. This ranking is ahead of AI service apps such as ChatGPT (OpenAI), Gemini (Google), Perplexity, and A.Dot (SKT).
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