DeepSeek V3 is a big deal for a number of reasons.

At only $5.5 million to train, it’s a fraction of the cost of models from OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic which are often in the hundreds of millions.

It breaks the whole AI as a service business model that OpenAI and Google have been pursuing making state-of-the-art language models accessible to smaller companies, research institutions, and even individuals.

The code is publicly available, allowing anyone to use, study, modify, and build upon it. Companies can integrate it into their products without paying for usage, making it financially attractive. The open-source nature fosters collaboration and rapid innovation.

The model goes head-to-head with and often outperforms models like GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet in various benchmarks. It excels in areas that are traditionally challenging for AI, like advanced mathematics and code generation. Its 128K token context window means it can process and understand very long documents. Meanwhile it processes text at 60 tokens per second, twice as fast as GPT-4o.

The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) approach used by the model is key to its performance. While the model has a massive 671 billion parameters, it only uses 37 billion at a time, making it incredibly efficient. Compared to Meta’s Llama3.1 (405 billion parameters used all at once), DeepSeek V3 is over 10 times more efficient yet performs better.

DeepSeek V3 can be seen as a significant technological achievement by China in the face of US attempts to limit its AI progress. China once again demonstrates that resourcefulness can overcome limitations.