How DeepSeek AI’s 3 Boldest Innovations Are Disrupting IT

DeepSeek's Latest AI Model V3, Development Cost $5.57 Million 75% Reduction in Memory Usage, Less Need for High-Performance GPUs [Unblock Media] DeepSeek's newly introduced AI model is causing ripples in the global IT industry. DeepSeek has emerged as a game-changer by implementing significant cost reduction and efficiency in the field of artificial intelligence, which requires complex computing capabilities. The company's latest model, V3, reportedly cost about $5.57 million to develop, which is only 1% of the cost to develop Meta's LLaMA 3 model, making it a hot topic. DeepSeek's innovations can be summarized in three major points. Firstly, they have made structural changes to drastically reduce memory usage. Unlike conventional models that use 32-bit floating point operations to process large parameters, DeepSeek uses an 8-bit method, reducing memory usage by up to 75%. This allowed the massive AI training costs, which once required over $100 million, to be lowered to about $5 million, and the number of needed high-performance GPUs was reduced from over 100,000 to around 2,000. One startup actually succeeded in reducing the budget of a previously $1 million project to under $100,000 using DeepSeek technology, proving the practical effectiveness of these figures. Choosing an open-source approach also supports DeepSeek's innovation. By making their model available for anyone to use, DeepSeek has opened access to high-performance AI technology without enormous cost burdens. This not only weakens the monopolistic positions of large tech companies but also enables small enterprises entering the market to pursue low-cost, high-efficiency AI projects. By lowering both financial and technical barriers, several startups are releasing DeepSeek-based solutions or participating in collaborative projects with large corporations. The hardware market is also likely to be shaken. Companies like NVIDIA and AMD, which have relied heavily on high-margin sales of high-performance GPUs, may be directly impacted by DeepSeek's approach, which delivers high-performance computing with fewer resources. As the need for large data centers and extremely expensive GPUs diminishes, dependency on high-cost hardware is expected to decrease naturally. Legal and societal shifts are also on the horizon. With DeepSeek's model being open-sourced, issues around licensing and regulation are expected to become more complex than before. International standards to prevent the misuse of AI models, cloud service provider data sovereignty issues, and personal data protection are likely to gain more attention. This extends beyond technical matters to areas requiring societal discussion, indicating that both government and private sectors need to collaborate. Simultaneously, the new 'efficiency-centric' paradigm proposed by DeepSeek also highlights potential intersections with the blockchain field. Blockchain excels in ensuring data reliability and transparency through distributed ledger technology, while DeepSeek implements high-performance computing with minimal resources. Combining the two could create a new platform offering high trust levels while operating large-scale computing resources in a decentralized manner. Running DeepSeek's lightweight models on a blockchain with numerous participating nodes could enable high-performance AI services without centralized data centers. Ultimately, the changes triggered by DeepSeek's advancements remind us that AI is not the sole domain of large IT companies or specialized research labs. Just as PCs ended the mainframe era and cloud computing revolutionized the IT ecosystem, DeepSeek's emergence is expected to fully restructure the accessibility and cost structure of AI, redrawing the industry's map. The barriers for major corporations are breaking down, meaning even new companies or individual developers with unique ideas can now realistically undertake AI projects. This technological innovation, making the future of AI more accessible and lowering entry thresholds, is expected to have a profound impact on society at large.