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<\/p>\nChinese startup DeepSeek has today released a new artificial intelligence model with “drastically reduced” costs, more than a year after it stunned the world with a low-cost reasoning model that matched the capabilities of US rivals.<\/p>\n
The AI race has intensified the rivalry between China and the US, and the White House yesterday accused Chinese entities of a massive effort to steal artificial intelligence technology.<\/p>\n
Hangzhou-based DeepSeek burst onto the scene in January last year with a generative AI chatbot, powered by its R1 reasoning model, that upended assumptions of US dominance in the strategic sector.<\/p>\n
The new version, DeepSeek-V4, “features an ultra-long context of one million words”, the company said in a statement on social media platform WeChat, hailing it as “world-leading, with drastically reduced compute (and) memory costs” in a separate announcement on X.<\/p>\n
The model’s context length, which determines how much input a model is able to absorb to help it complete tasks, “(achieves) leadership in both domestic and open-source fields across agent capabilities, world knowledge, and reasoning performance”, the WeChat statement said.<\/p>\n
A “preview version” of the open source model is now available, the company said.<\/p>\n
Experts say V4’s release marks an “inflection point” in terms of hardware and cost.<\/p>\n
“This addresses the long-standing issues of slower performance and higher costs associated with long context lengths, marking a genuine inflection point for the industry,” Zhang Yi, the founder of tech research firm iiMedia, told AFP.<\/p>\n
“For end users, this will bring widespread, accessible benefits. For instance, if ultra-long context support becomes a standard feature, long-text processing is expected to move beyond high-end research labs and enter mainstream commercial applications,” he said.<\/p>\n
The new V4 is released as two versions, DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash, with the latter being “a more efficient and economical choice” because it has smaller parameters.<\/p>\n
‘Sputnik moment’<\/p>\n
V4-Pro has 1.6 trillion parameters while the V4-Flash has 284 billion parameters, which refine models’ decision-making ability.<\/p>\n
The model has also been “optimised” for popular AI Agent products such as Claude Code, OpenClaw, OpenCode and CodeBuddy, the DeepSeek statement said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“In world knowledge benchmarks, DeepSeek-V4-Pro significantly leads other open-source models and is only slightly outperformed by the top-tier closed-source model, (Google’s) Gemini-Pro-3.1,” the statement added.<\/p>\n
Last year’s so-called “DeepSeek shock” sparked a sell-off of AI-related shares and a reckoning on business strategy in what was also described as a “Sputnik moment” for the industry.<\/p>\n
The chatbot performed at a similar level to ChatGPT and other top US offerings, but the company said it had taken significantly less computing power to develop.<\/p>\n
However, its sudden popularity raised questions over data privacy and censorship, with the chatbot often refusing to answer questions on sensitive topics such as the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.<\/p>\n
At home, DeepSeek’s AI tools have been widely adopted by Chinese municipalities and healthcare institutions as well as the financial sector and other businesses.<\/p>\n
This has been partly driven by DeepSeek’s decision to make its systems open source, with their inner workings public – in contrast to the proprietary models sold by OpenAI and other Western rivals.<\/p>\n
But the White House has accused Chinese firms of vying to “steal” American technology, ahead of an expected summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in Beijing next month.<\/p>\n
“The US has evidence that foreign entities, primarily in China, are running industrial-scale distillation campaigns to steal American AI,” Trump’s science and technology chief advisor Michael Kratsios said in a post on X.<\/p>\n
Distillation is a common practice within AI development, often used by companies to create cheaper, smaller versions of their own models.<\/p>\n
DeepSeek’s announcement also came as Meta said it planned to cut a tenth of its staff as it looks for productivity gains from the rest of the workforce while investing heavily in artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
Reports said Microsoft was also looking to trim its ranks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chinese startup DeepSeek has today released a new artificial intelligence model with “drastically reduced” costs, more than a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":414829,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-414828","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=414828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414828\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/414829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=414828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=414828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=414828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}