Welcome to Tech Talk, where we explore all things technology in relation to student life. This week, we’ll take a look at two big names in AI and their battle for the number one spot.
This issue we have two AI’s fighting to claim market supremacy! The reigning champion of the AI research and development arena, OpenAI, took a shot to the jaw this past week with the release of a new competitor, DeepSeek. That’s right, this new AI is lean, mean, and coming to take OpenAI’s lunch money. But why did it rise in popularity so quickly? That’s a complex question with a complex answer. In my opinion, it’s because DeepSeek is not only faster, more robust, and cheaper to create, but also has to do with the fact that it’s open source. This means you can download the source code of this Large Language Model (LLM) for free and modify it to your heart’s content. Unlike DeepSeek, OpenAI’s GPT models and a few others are closed source, meaning you can’t use or modify the source code without permission or a license.
I took some time to try it out for myself, and I was impressed. I’ve used ChatGPT and others before to help me with my own projects, and although these are great tools, you need to check the info they give you. However, one of my main frustrations with these tools has to do with the limitations imposed by the system, which limit the use of their service. The common workaround to these limitations is to pay for a subscription, but I am not paying to use these tools, especially if they can be used for free.
When trying out both AIs, I thought of asking DeepSeek and ChatGPT to compare two numbers: 9.11 and 9.9. I simply asked them both to tell me which number is greater. ChatGPT said that 9.11 is the greater number and then provided its logic as to why 9.11 is greater. DeepSeek answered that 9.9 is greater than 9.11, which is true. So why the discrepancy? I personally think that ChatGPT is counting the significant digits — perhaps it’s reasoning that there are three digits in 9.11 in comparison to the two digits present in 9.9. This is speculation on my part, but it was interesting to see one model get it wrong and the other one get it right.
I believe DeepSeek is going to stick around, and it may even push ChatGPT to the side, given that DeepSeek is free and open source for all. This is going to shake up an already volatile market, which it did upon release by causing NVIDIA stocks to take a hit. Many AI companies rely on the latest and greatest technology in order to train and run their AI products, but due to trade sanctions, DeepSeek was developed on less powerful hardware. This trade limitation ended up pushing DeepSeek’s developers to create a much more efficient LLM.
