Decoding DeepSeek

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

Thoughtworks

Careers, Business, 907234, Technology

4.7 • 53 Ratings

🗓️ 6 February 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The release of DeepSeek's AI models at the end of January 2025 sent shockwaves around the world. The weeks that followed have been rife with hype and rumor, ranging from suggestions that DeepSeek has completely upended the tech industry to claims the efficiency gains ostensibly unlocked by DeepSeek are exagerrated. So, what's the reality? And what does it all really mean for the tech industry?

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, two of Thoughtworks' AI leaders — Prasanna Pendse (Global Director of AI Strategy) and Shayan Mohanty (Head of AI Research) — join hosts Prem Chandrasekaran and Ken Mugrage to provide a much-needed clear and sober perspective on DeepSeek. They dig into some of the technical details and discuss how the DeepSeek team was able to optimize the limited hardware at their disposal, and think through what the implications might be for the industry in the months to come.

Read Prasanna's take on DeepSeek on the Thoughtworks blog: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/generative-ai/demystifying-deepseek

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome everyone to the yet another edition of the ThoughtWorks Technology podcast.
0:13.3	Today we are going to be talking about deep seek and everything that is related to it,
0:19.2	the implications, what it means for us going forward, and how it
0:23.0	seems to have changed the world. I've got Ken Mugridge, who is my co-host with me. Ken,
0:30.4	do you quickly want to introduce yourself? Hi, everybody. This is Ken, one of the regular,
0:34.9	the hosts of your podcast. Thanks for joining us. And we also got Cheyenne and Prasanna who are going to be talking about this really, really fun topic.
0:45.5	Shian, do you want to quickly introduce yourself?
0:47.7	Yeah, I'm Shayan. I'm the head of AI research at ThoughtWorks, previously CEO and co-founder of Watchful.
0:53.8	Good to be here.
0:55.0	How about you, Prasanna?
0:56.4	And Prasanna, I look after the AI strategy for ThoughtWorks.
1:00.9	Very, very warm welcome to both of you. It's wonderful to have you here. We are looking forward
1:05.7	to a great conversation. And so today, we are going to be talking about deep seek.
1:11.6	What exactly is deep seek?
1:14.4	And why is it that it's relevant and why are we talking about it?
1:18.7	So deep seek is a startup in China that launched a model that they claimed is, performs as well as an 01 in certain reasoning tasks.
1:31.1	And, uh, one claim in their paper, the V3 paper talks about the cost that it took, uh, to
1:38.3	train this at about 5.6 million, which got taken out of context and spread like wildfire.
1:45.0	So everybody now assumes that anyone can start from scratch and train a model in under $6 million,
1:53.0	and beat Open AI.
1:57.0	So that's kind of why it became extremely popular.
1:59.0	At the same time, the app works well, and people started using it, and it's free.
	...

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