DeepSeek AI, the artificial intelligence (AI) lab based in China, announced on Friday that it will launch five open-source repositories starting next week.
The company is calling it the ‘open source week’ and said on X, “We’re a tiny team DeepSeek exploring AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Starting next week, we’ll be open-sourcing five repos, sharing our small but sincere progress with full transparency.”
Currently, the company has a collection of 14 open-source models and repositories on Hugging Face.
Recently, the company released its DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3 models. These AI models offer state-of-the-art performance while being trained and deployed at a fraction of the cost of their competitors.
Last month, NVIDIA’s market cap dropped by around $589 billion in a single day, raising concerns about the amount of capital and computing resources needed to build powerful AI models.
The DeepSeek-V3 used just 2048 NVIDIA H800 GPUs to achieve performance better than most open-source models. Andrej Karpathy, former OpenAI researcher, said the DeepSeek-V3’s level of capability is “supposed to require clusters of closer to 16,000 GPUs”.
For instance, xAI’s new Grok-3 has been trained on over 1 lakh NVIDIA GPUs, and Karpathy said it is slightly better than the DeepSeek-R1.
It will be interesting to see DeepSeek’s upcoming commitment to launch open-source projects. Furthermore, its previous attempts gained appreciation from many industry leaders.
For instance, Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, said that instead of viewing DeepSeek’s success as China surpassing the United States, it would be better to interpret it as “open-source models surpassing proprietary ones”.
Moreover, many leading AI labs across the world are pushing for an open-source approach.
Baidu, another Chinese tech giant, announced that it will release the source code for its Ernie 4.5 models. During the earnings call, Baidu’s CEO, Robin Li, said, “One thing we learned from DeepSeek is that open-sourcing the best models can greatly help adoption. When the model is open source, people naturally want to try it out of curiosity, which helps drive broader adoption.”
OpenAI is also exploring the development of open-source models. In a recent interview with Sky News, CEO Sam Altman said, “I think we should probably open source somewhat more.”
Moreover, in a Reddit ask-me-anything session, he said, “I personally think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open-source strategy.”
