For the last week, the internet
has buzzed under wave after wave of news about DeepSeek--a Chinese version of artificial intelligence (AI) programs like OpenAI's ChatGPT, which use machine learning algorithms and oceans of training data with sketchy intellectual property rights to grow into incredibly powerful algorithms. DeepSeek made news predominantly for its reportedly low cost and for having been built with more common processors than the most cutting-edge (and extremely costly) Nvidia GPU hardware. (Nvidia has had a chokehold on AI development for years, and bitcoin mining before that, because their powerful hardware can crunch thousands more pieces of data at a time than the hardware of their competitors--or their older models.)
But neither of those factors may be DeepSeek's most exciting legacy within the AI field. For people outside of massive corporations, DeepSeek is making news because its venture capital owners have chosen to make their model what's called "open weight," which is a subset of open source. That's surprising, to say the least, for a company originating in Hangzhou (a city with 13 million people and an economy that's reportedly larger than those of entire countries like Argentina) and based in Beijing (an even huger economy).
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