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Equity

DeepSeek: separating fact from hype

Equity

TechCrunch

Founders, Silicon Valley, Finance, Ipo, Vc, Technology, Business News, Startups, Business, Venture Capital, News, Stock Market, Entrepreneurship, Techcrunch

4.2365 Ratings

🗓️ 1 February 2025

⏱️ 25 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today, we’re bringing you a bonus episode zeroing in on DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab that’s recently taken over the news and the app stores, beating out OpenAI's ChatGPT. Max Zeff is talking about it all with Ion Stoica, Professor of Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley and the cofounder and executive chairman of software startup Databricks. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Why Stoica believes the future of AI lies in "doubling down on open source." Microsoft's decision to host DeepSeek on Azure. What the U.S. can do to foster accelerated innovation – with a look back at SB-1047 and a look ahead to 2025. The controversy surrounding claims that DeepSeek used OpenAI’s models to train its own. Equity will be back next week, so stay tuned! Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday.  Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes here. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. We’d also like to thank TechCrunch’s audience development team. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.

Transcript

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0:00.0

This episode is presented by Invest Puerto Rico.

0:03.4

If you believe your business can go anywhere, Puerto Rico is the place. Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.

0:23.8

I'm Max Zeph, and today we're zeroing in on Deepseek, the Chinese AI lab that's been going absolutely

0:29.0

viral this week. To talk about it all, I'm joined by Jan Stoica, a professor of computer science at

0:34.3

UC Berkeley, and also the co-founder and executive chairman of Databricks, as well as any scale. He's very active in the AI policy world, and he's perfect

0:43.6

to break all this down for us. Jan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Max. Of course. So I think

0:50.0

right off the bat, I'd love to kind of just quickly separate, you know, facts from hype here.

0:56.3

And could you kind of break down for us? What to you are the real breakthroughs that Deep Seek has

1:01.8

achieved with its recent models? And what is overhyped and has gotten too much play?

1:08.0

Yeah. So I think I will start with three things, which are pretty factual.

1:13.4

So first, obviously, is performing very well on the benchmarks.

1:18.5

Not only that, but also on our own chatbot arena, which, as you probably know,

1:23.9

it's a very popular in the wild, large language model evaluation platform.

1:29.9

And where it's now in number three,

1:32.6

at least the last time I checked.

1:34.6

So clearly, it's matches or provide roughly similar performance

1:38.7

as the top live language models, proprietary models.

1:42.9

The number two, what we know, because the model is released,

1:46.4

we know that serving queries on deep sync R1 and V3 is very efficient.

1:53.2

And obviously the number three is open source.

1:56.5

So I think that's what definitely in my mind, behind the hype, it's changing a little bit the trajectory of evolution of these models in the sense that it's accelerated.

2:10.8

Now, in terms of fundamentally, deep seek is not a new architecture.

...

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