Tech giants like Alibaba and ByteDance, in addition to a handful of startups with deep-pocketed investors, dominate the Chinese AI space, making it difficult for small or medium-sized enterprises to compete. An organization like DeepSeek, which has no plans to boost funds, is rare.
Zihan Wang, the previous DeepSeek worker, told that he had access to abundant computing resources and was given freedom to experiment when working at DeepSeek, “a luxury that few fresh graduates would get at any company.”
In an interview with the Chinese media outlet 36Kr in July 2024 Liang said that a further challenge Chinese firms face on top of chip sanctions, is that their AI engineering techniques are inclined to be less efficient. “We [most Chinese companies] need to eat twice the computing power to attain the identical results. Combined with data efficiency gaps, this might mean needing as much as 4 times more computing power. Our goal is to constantly close these gaps,” he said.
But DeepSeek found ways to cut back memory usage and speed up calculation without significantly sacrificing accuracy. “The team loves turning a hardware challenge into a possibility for innovation,” says Wang.
Liang himself stays deeply involved in DeepSeek’s research process, running experiments alongside his team. “The entire team shares a collaborative culture and dedication to hardcore research,” Wang says.
In addition to prioritizing efficiency, Chinese firms are increasingly embracing open-source principles. Alibaba Cloud has released over 100 latest open-source AI models, supporting 29 languages and catering to varied applications, including coding and arithmetic. Similarly, startups like Minimax and 01.AI have open-sourced their models.
In line with a white paper released last yr by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, a state-affiliated research institute, the variety of AI large language models worldwide has reached 1,328, with 36% originating in China. This positions China because the second-largest contributor to AI, behind the USA.
“This generation of young Chinese researchers discover strongly with open-source culture because they profit a lot from it,” says Thomas Qitong Cao, an assistant professor of technology policy at Tufts University
