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When a small Chinese company called DeepSeek revealed that it had created an A.I. system that could match leading A.I. products made in the United States, the news was greeted in many circles as a warning that China was closing the gap in the global race to build artificial intelligence. DeepSeek also said it built its new A.I. technology more cost effectively and with fewer hard-to-get computers chips than its American competitors, shocking an industry that had come to believe that bigger and better A.I. would cost billions and billions of dollars.
But A.I. experts inside the tech giant Meta saw DeepSeek’s breakthrough as something more than the arrival of a nimble, new competitor from the other side of the world: It was vindication that an unconventional decision Meta made nearly two years ago was the right call.
Meta executives believe DeepSeek’s breakthrough shows that upstarts now have a chance to innovate and compete with the tech giants that have mostly had the A.I. playing field to themselves because A.I. costs so much to build. It was something Meta executives hoped would happen when they gave away their own technology.
Our open source strategy was validated,” said Ragavan Srinivasan, a Meta vice president, in an interview on Tuesday. The more people who have access to the technology needed to move things forward faster, the better.”
Meta is also taking a close look at the work done at DeepSeek. Following Meta’s lead, the Chinese company released its technology to the open source tech community as well. Meta has created several “war rooms” where employees are reverse engineering DeepSeek’s technology, according to two people familiar with the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Before Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, gave away its A.I. tech, the company had been focused on projects like virtual reality. It was caught flat-footed when OpenAI introduced the chatbot ChatGPT in late 2022.
By freely sharing the code that drove its A.I. technology, Meta hoped to accelerate the development of its technology and attract others to build on top of it.
Yann LeCun, an early A.I. pioneer who is Meta’s chief A.I. scientist, said in a post on LinkedIn that people who think the takeaway from DeepSeek’s work should be that China is beating the United States at A.I. development are misreading the situation. “The correct reading is: ‘Open source models are surpassing proprietary ones,” he said.
Many in Silicon Valley said Meta’s move set a dangerous precedent because the chatbots could help spread disinformation, hate speech and other toxic content. But Meta said that any risks were far outweighed by the benefits of open source. And most A.I. development, they added, had been shared around through open source until ChatGPT made companies leery of showing what they were working on.
Now, if DeepSeek’s work can be replicated — particularly its claim that it was able to build its A.I. more affordably than most had thought possible — that could provide more opportunities for more companies to expand on what Meta did.
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