How a product will perform no one knows, is what any OEM will tell you. There are many slips between the cup and lip, when it comes to commercial success of any product. This might still remain the case even if the product is for free and might be world class. Who would accept a product that is world class, if It falls by the commercial / customer adoption wayside. While the GPT was in vogue making it conversational on GPT-3.5 hit the world in a manner no product has even done. Customer adoption was at the core of its roaring success.
The ease of use and delivering what is in need of, is the key to the likelihood of a commercial success. Though there is a huge business model behind it, if the customer gets it for free, the likelihood of it hitting the roof of customer adoption is really very high. While we got comfortable with ChatGPT LLM and similar models and also accepted this is the only way to surge ahead in IT, inclusive of the learning, compute and the business model. But lo and behold that was not to be. DeepSeek’s entry in January with its R1 turned the tables.
While the whole world was forced to sit up and take note of it, the red carpet rolled out for its adoption in China is consolidating it in a big way. Open source, the compute required and the cost at which it was developed left the world gaping. As the headlines goes, as on date, “courts to crisis lines, babus in China embrace DeepSeek.” Courts have for long faced the drudgery of drafting everywhere in the world. In China, courthouse officials are using DeepSeek to draft legal documents within minutes.
Last month DeepSeek founder shook hands with Xi Jinping, China’s top leader. Since then officials all around the country have been racing to show how best they are using this technology. Doctors at a hospital in Fuzhou, in Eastern China, are using it to propose treatment plans. In another city, Meizhou, a city in Southern China, it is DeepSeek that answers a government helpline. In Shenzhen, officials have used this tool for searching for people who had been reported missing. In an interesting application, they used DeepSeek to analyse surveillance video. By this they were able to track down in at least 300 instances. Suffice to say, it is all over, gaining the status of an official AI LLM.
DEEPSEEK PROMISES AN ANTIDOTE TO THE WELL ESTABLISHED AI LLMs, THE BEST WILL EMERGE TO RULE THE WORLD.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.