A Low-Cost, Open-Source AI Model Comparable to ChatGPT

By Dr. Shripad Bhat
January 29, 2025

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) requires huge computing power and resources. Reportedly, the cost of training GPT-4 was more than $100 million (Link: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of-giant-ai-models-is-already-over/).

Currently, there are sanctions against exporting advanced chips to China (Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_New_Export_Controls_on_Advanced_Computing_and_Semiconductors_to_China). Without access to such resources, a Chinese startup built an efficient, low-cost model with a training cost of only $6 million!. The performance of this model is roughly comparable to OpenAI o1. Impressive, right?

While cutting edge models like GPT-4 (owned by OpenAI) are not open source, DeepSeek has been released as open source.

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    <blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”>
        <p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>🚀 DeepSeek-R1 is here!<br><br>⚡ Performance on par with OpenAI-o1<br>📖 Fully open-source
            model & technical report<br>🏆 MIT licensed: Distill & commercialize freely!<br><br>🌐 Website & API
            are live now! Try DeepThink at <a href=”https://t.co/v1TFy7LHNy”>https://t.co/v1TFy7LHNy</a> today!<br><br>🐋
            1/n <a href=”https://t.co/7BlpWAPu6y”>pic.twitter.com/7BlpWAPu6y</a></p>— DeepSeek (@deepseek_ai) <a
            href=”https://twitter.com/deepseek_ai/status/1881318130334814301?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>January 20, 2025</a>
    </blockquote>
    <script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>

Link to the full technical report of DeepSeek: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1/blob/main/DeepSeek_R1.pdf