DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup, shocked the world after unveiling an AI model last week that rivals leading models like OpenAI’s o1, while claiming it cost far less to develop and required far fewer Nvidia chips—and giving it away for free. The fallout sent Nvidia’s stock plummeting today and left observers wondering: What does it mean for the most deep-pocketed AI startups, OpenAI and Anthropic, which sell their models to consumers and companies, as well as highly funded competitors like Mistral and Cohere?
The current moment is deeply ironic, Toronto-based AI developer and consultant Reuven Cohen told Fortune. DeepSeek released its AI model as open-source, meaning the company allowed researchers, developers, and other users to access the underlying code and its “weights” (which determine how the model processes information) to use, modify, or improve. That sounds a lot like what OpenAI said it would do when it was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit company that shared its research and techniques openly (as its name suggests). But OpenAI is now “by far, the most closed in every way possible,” Cohen said.
