China's latest AI breakthrough has leapfrogged the world. I think we should take the development out of China very, very seriously. A game-changing move that does not come from OpenAI, Google or meta. There is a new model that has all of the valley buzzing. But from a Chinese lab called Deepsea.
It's opened a lot of eyes of like what is actually happening in AI in China. What took Google in OpenAI years and hundreds of millions of dollars to build, Deepsea says took it just two months and less than $6 million. They have the best open source model and all the American developers are building on that. I'm Georgia Bosa with the Tech Check Take. China's AI breakthrough.
It was a technological leap that shocked Silicon Valley. A newly unveiled free open source AI model that beat some of the most powerful ones on the market. But it wasn't a new launch from OpenAI or model announcement from Anthropic. This one was built in the east by a Chinese research lab called Deepsea. And the details behind its development stunned top AI researchers here in the US.
First the cost, the AI lab reportedly spent just $5.6 million to build Deepsea version 3. Compare that to OpenAI. We're just spending $5 billion a year. And Google, which expects capital expenditures in 2024 to soar to over $50 billion. And then there's Microsoft that shelled out more than $13 billion just to invest in OpenAI. But even more stunning how Deepsea scrap your model was able to outperform the lavishly funded American ones.
To see the Deepsea new model, it's super impressive in terms of both how they have greatly effectively done an open source model that does what is this inference time compute and it's super computer efficient. It beat Meta's llama, OpenAI's GPT-40, an anthropic's cloud son at 3.5 on accuracy on wide ranging tests.
要看到Deepsea的新模型,它在多方面都给人留下深刻印象。首先,他们在开源模型的实现上非常有效,这个模型在推理计算时间上表现卓越且计算效率极高。它在准确性方面的广泛测试中击败了Meta的Llama、OpenAI的GPT-40和Anthropic的Cloud Son 3.5。
A subset of 500 math problems, an AI math evaluation, coding competitions, and a test of spotting and fixing bugs in code. Quickly following that up with a new reasoning model called R1, which just as easily outperformed OpenAI's cutting edge O1 in some of those third party tests. Today we released Humanities Last Exam, which is a new evaluation or benchmark of AI models that we produced by getting math, physics, biology, chemistry, professors to provide the hardest questions they could possibly imagine.
Deepsea, which is the leading Chinese AI lab, their model is actually the top performing or roughly on par with the best American models. They accomplished all that despite the strict semiconductor restrictions that the US government has imposed on China, which has essentially shackled them out of computing power. Washington has drawn a hard line against China and the AI race, cutting the country off from receiving America's most powerful chips like NVIDIA's H100 GPUs.
Those were once thought to be essential to building a competitive AI model with startups and big tech firms alike scrambling to get their hands on any available. But Deepsea turned that on its head, sidestepping the rules by using NVIDIA's less performant H800s to build the latest model and showing that the chip export controls were not the chokehold DC intended. They were able to take whatever hardware they were trained on but use it way more efficiently.
But just choose behind Deepsea anyway. Despite its breakthrough, very, very little is known about its lab and its founder, Liang Wenfeng. According to Chinese media reports, Deepsea was born out of a Chinese hedge fund called High Flyer Quant that manages about $8 billion in assets. The mission on its developer site, it reads simply unraveled the mystery of AGI with curiosity, answered the essential question with long termism.
The leading American AI startups, meanwhile, open AI and anthropic, they have detailed charters and constitutions that lay out their principles and their founding missions, like these sections on AI safety and responsibility. Despite several attempts to reach someone at Deepsea, we never got a response. How did they actually assemble this talent? How did they assemble all the hardware? How did they assemble the data to do all this? We don't know. And it's never been publicized and hopefully we can learn that.
But the mystery brings into sharp relief just how urgent and complex the AI face off against China has become. Because it's not just Deepsea. Other more well known Chinese AI models have carved out positions in the race with limited resources as well. Haifu Li, he's one of the leading AI researchers in China, formerly leading Google's operations there. Now his startup, 01.AI.
It's attracting attention, becoming a unicorn just eight months after founding and bringing in almost $14 million in revenue in 2024. The thing that shocks my friends in the Silicon Valley is not just our performance, but that we train the model with only $3 million. And GBT4 was trained by 80 to 100 million. Trained with just $3 million. Alibaba's QN, meanwhile, cut costs by as much as 85% on its large language models in a bid to attract more developers and signaling that the race is on. China's breakthrough undermines the lead that our AI labs were once thought to have. In early 2024, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, he predicted China was two to three years behind the US in AI. But now Schmidt is singing a different tune. Here he is on ABCs this week. By use, I think we were a couple of years ahead of China. China has caught up in the last six months in a way that is remarkable. The fact of the matter is that a couple of the Chinese programs, one example is called DeepSeek, looks like they've caught up. It raises major questions about just how wide open AI's melt really is.
Back when OpenAI released Chatchi BT to the world in November of 2022, it was unprecedented and uncontested. Now the company faces not only the international competition from Chinese models, but fierce domestic competition from Google's Gemini, Anthropix Cloud, and meta's open source llama model. And now the game has changed. The widespread availability of powerful open source models allows developers to skip the demanding, capital intensive steps of building and training models themselves. Now they can build on top of existing models, making it significantly easier to jump to the frontier, that is the front of the race, with a smaller budget and a smaller T. In the last two weeks, AI research teams have really opened their eyes and have become way more ambitious on what's possible with a lot less capital. So previously, you know, to get to the frontier, you'd have to think about hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and perhaps a billion dollars of investment.
What DeepSeek has now done here in Silicon Valley is it's opened our eyes to what you can actually accomplish with 10, 15, 20, 30 million dollars. It also means any company like OpenAI that claims the frontier today could lose it tomorrow. That's how DeepSeek was able to catch up so quickly. It started building on the existing frontier of AI. It's approach focusing on iterating on existing technology rather than reinventing the wheel. They can take a really good big model and use a process called distillation. And what distillation is is basically you use a very large model to help your small model get smart at the thing you want it to get smart at. And that's actually very cost efficient. It closed the gap by using available data sets, applying innovative tweaks and leveraging existing models.
So much so that DeepSeek's model has run into an identity crisis. It's convinced that it's chat GBT. When you ask it directly, what model are you? DeepSeek responds, I'm an AI language model created by OpenAI specifically based on the GBT4 architecture. Leading OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to post in a thinly veiled shot at DeepSeek just days after the model was released, it's relatively easy to copy something that you know works. It's extremely hard to do something new, risky and difficult when you don't know if it will work. That's not exactly what DeepSeek did. It emulated GBT by leveraging OpenAI's existing outputs and architecture principles while quietly introducing its own enhancements, really blurring the line between itself and chat GBT. It all puts pressure on a closed source leader like OpenAI to justify its costlier model as more and potentially nimbler competitors emerge. Everybody copies everybody in this field. You can say Google did the transform refers, it's not OpenAI and OpenAI just copied it.
DeepSeek的模型遇到了身份危机,甚至觉得自己是Chat GBT。当你直接问它,“你是什么模型?”时,DeepSeek会回答:“我是由OpenAI创建的AI语言模型,基于GBT4架构。”这导致OpenAI的CEO Sam Altman在该模型发布后几天内含蓄地抨击DeepSeek:“复制一个你知道有效的东西相对容易。而在不确定是否会有效的情况下,做一些新的、冒险的和困难的事情却极其难。” DeepSeek并没有完全这样做。它通过利用OpenAI现有的输出和架构原则来模拟GBT,同时悄悄地引入自己的增强功能,模糊了它与Chat GBT之间的界限。这一切都让像OpenAI这样的闭源领导者承受压力,需要证明其成本更高的模型的价值,尤其是在出现更多潜在和灵活的竞争者时。在这个领域,每个人都在互相借鉴。你可以说谷歌发明了转换器,OpenAI不是发明者,OpenAI只是复制了它。
Google built the first large language models, they didn't prioritize it but OpenAI did it into productized way. So you can say all this in many ways, it doesn't matter. So if everyone is copying one another, it raises the question, is massive spend on individual LLMs, even a good investment anymore? Now no one has as much at stake as OpenAI. The startup raised over $6 billion in its last funding round alone. But the company has yet to turn a profit and with its core business centered on building the models, it's much more exposed than companies like Google and Amazon who have cloud and ad businesses bankrolling their spend. For OpenAI, reasoning will be key. A model that thinks before it generates a response going beyond pattern recognition to analyze draw logical conclusions and solve really complex problems. For now, the startup's 01 reasoning model, it's still cutting edge, but for how long? Researchers at Berkeley showed that they could build a reasoning model for $450 just last week. So you can actually create these models that do thinking for much, much less. You don't need those huge amounts of pre-training the model, so I think the game is shifting. It means that staying on top may require as much creativity as capital. Deepseeks breakthrough also comes at a very tricky time for the AI darling. Just as OpenAI is moving to a for profit model and facing unprecedented brain drain. Can it raise more money at ever higher valuations if the game is changing?
As Schmath-Pall-Happatia puts it, let me say the quiet part out loud. AI model building is a money trap. Those trip restrictions from the US government, they were intended to slow down the race. To keep American tech out of American ground to stay ahead in the race. What we want to do is we want to keep it in this country. China is a competitor and others are competitors. So instead, the restrictions might have been just what China needed. Necessity is the mother of invention. Because they had to go figure out workarounds, they actually ended up building something a lot more efficient. It's really remarkable the amount of progress they've made with as little capital as it's taken them to make that progress. It drove them to get creative with huge implications. DeepSeeq is an open source model, meaning that developers have full access and they can customize its weights or fine tune it to their liking.
正如 Schmath-Pall-Happatia 所说,让我把不便直言的话说出来。构建 AI 模型实际上是一种资金陷阱。美国政府的旅行限制原本是为了减缓竞争,防止美国技术被带出国,以便在竞争中保持领先。我们的目标是让技术留在国内。中国和其他国家都是竞争者。因此,这些限制反而可能正是中国所需要的。所谓“需求是发明之母”。因为他们需要寻找解决方案,结果他们实际上建立了一种更高效的东西。令人惊讶的是,他们用相对少的资金取得了如此大的进步。这促使他们变得更加有创造力,并带来了巨大的影响。DeepSeeq 是一个开源模型,这意味着开发者可以完全访问,并根据自己的需要定制或微调其参数。
It's known that once open source is caught up or improved over closed source software, all developers migrate to that. But key is that it's also inexpensive. The lower the cost, the more attractive it is for developers to adopt. The bottom line is our inference cost is 10 cents per million tokens. And that's one-thirtieth of what the typical comparable model chart is. And where's it going? It's what the 10 cents would lead to building apps for much lower costs. So if you wanted to build a U.com or a PLEXID or some other app, you can either pay open AI $4.40 per million tokens. Or if you have our model, it costs you just 10 cents. It could mean that the prevailing model in global AI may be open source. As organizations and nations come around to the idea that collaboration and decentralization, those things can drive innovation faster and more efficiently than proprietary closed ecosystems.
A cheaper, more efficient, widely adopted open source model from China, that could lead to a major shift in dynamics. That's more dangerous. Because then they get to own the mind share, the ecosystem. In other words, the adoption of a Chinese open source model at scale, that could undermine US leadership while embedding China more deeply into the fabric of global tech infrastructure. There's always a second point where open source can stop being open source too, right? So the licenses are very favorable today, but it could close it. Exactly. Over time, they can always change the license. So it's important that we actually have people here in America building. And that's why it matters so important.
Another consequence of China's AI breakthrough is giving its Communist Party control of the narrative. AI models built in China, they're forced to adhere to a certain set of rules set by the state. They must embody four socialist values. Studies have shown that models created by Tencent and Alibaba, they will censor historical events like Tiananmen Square, deny human rights abuse, and filter criticism of Chinese political leaders. That contest is about whether we're going to have democratic AI informed by democratic values built to serve democratic purposes or we're going to end up with other credit AI. It developers really begin to adopt these models on mass because they're more efficient. That could have a serious ripple effect. Trickle down to even consumer facing AI applications and influence how trustworthy those AI generated responses from chatbots really are.
There's really only two countries right now in the world that can build this at scale. And that is the US and China. And so the consequences of the stakes in and around this are just enormous. Enormous stakes, enormous consequences, and hanging in the balance America's lead. For our topic so complex and new, we turn to an expert who's actually building in the space and model agnostic. Perplexity co-founder and CEO Arvin Srinivas, who you heard from throughout our piece, he sat down with me for more than 30 minutes to discuss deep-seek and its implications as well as perplexity's roadmap. We think it's worth listening to that whole conversation. So here it is.
So first I want to know what the stakes are. What describe the AI race between China and the US and what's at stake? Okay, so first of all, China has a lot of disadvantages in competing with the US. Number one is the fact that they don't get access to all the hardware that we have access to here. So they're kind of working with lower NGP use than us. It's almost like working with the previous generation GPUs, Crapili. The fact that the bigger models tend to be more smarter, naturally, at disadvantage. But the flip side of this is that necessity is the mother of invention. Because they had to go figure out workarounds, they actually ended up building something a lot more efficient. It's like saying, hey, look, you guys really got to get a top-notch model and I'm not going to give you resources and figure out something. Unless it's mathematically possible to prove that it's impossible to do so, you can always try to come up with something more efficient. But that is likely to make them come up with a more efficient solution than America. And of course they have open-source it so we can still adopt something like that here. But that kind of talent, they're building to do that will become an edge for them over time, right? The leading open-source model in America is Meta's llama family. It's really good. It's kind of like a model that you can run on your computer. But even though it got pretty close to GBT4 and a solid at the time of its release, the model that was closest in quality was a giant 405B, not the 70B that you could run on your computer. And so there was still not a small, cheap, fast, efficient open-source model that DRY will deem most powerful, close models from opening an entropic. Nothing from America. Nothing from Mistraa either. And then these guys come out with a crazy model that's like 10x cheaper and API pricing than GBT4 or 15x cheaper than solid, I believe.
Really fast, 16 tokens per second. And pretty much equal or bettors in some benchmarks and worse in some others, but roughly in that ballpark of 4.0s quality. And they did it all with approximately just 2048 H800 GPUs, which is actually equivalent to somewhere around 1500 or 1,000 to 1,500 H100 GPUs. That's like 20 to 30x lower than the amount of GPUs that GBT4 is usually trained on. And it roughly $5 million in total compute budget. They did it with so little money and such an amazing model, gave it away for free, wrote a technical paper, and definitely it makes us all question like, okay, if we have the equivalent of Doge for model training, this is an example of that. Right. Efficiency is what you're getting at. So fraction of the price, fraction of the time, dumb down GPUs, essentially.
What was your surprise when you understood what they had done? So my surprise was that when I actually went through the technical paper, the amount of clever solutions they came up with, first of all, they trained to make sure experts model. It's not that easy to train. There's a lot of like, the main reason people find a difficult catch up with OpenAI, especially in the MOE architecture, is that there's a lot of irregular loss spikes. The numerics are not stable. So often, you've got to restart the training checkpoint again. And
a lot of infrastructure needs to be built for that. And they came up with very clever solutions to balance that without adding additional hacks. And they also figured out floating point eight, eight-bit training, at least for some of the numerics. And they cleverly figured out which has to be in higher position, which has to be in lower position. To my knowledge, I think floating point eight training is not that well understood. The most of the training in America is still running in F-16, maybe OpenAI and so many people are trying to explore that, but it's pretty difficult to get it right.
So because necessary, some of them have invention, because they don't have that much memory, that many GPUs, they figured out a lot of numerical stability stuff that makes their training work. And they claim in the paper that for majority of the training was a stable, which means what they can always rerun those training runs again. And on more data or better data. And then it only trained for 60 days. So that's pretty amazing. So to say you were surprised. So I was definitely surprised. Usually the wisdom, or like I wouldn't say it was the myth, is that Chinese are just good at copying. So we stopped writing research papers in America. If we stopped describing the details of our infrastructure, architecture, and stop open sourcing, they're not going to be able to catch up.
But the reality is some of the details in DeepSeed 3 are so good that I would be surprised if Meta took a look at it and incorporated some of that in the number four. I wouldn't necessarily say copy, it's all like sharing science, engineering. But the point is like it's changing. It's not like China's copycat. They're also innovating. We don't know exactly the data that it was trained on, right? Even though it's open source. We know some of the ways and things that was trained up and not everything.
事实上,DeepSeed 3 中的一些细节非常出色,以至于如果 Meta 看到这些细节并在第四版中融入其中,我会感到惊讶。我不会说这是抄袭,更像是科学和工程技术的分享。重点是,这种情况正在发生变化,中国现在不仅仅是“模仿者”,他们也在创新。虽然 DeepSeed 3 是开源的,但我们并不完全了解它所使用的训练数据。我们知道一些训练方法和内容,但并不是全部。
And there's this idea that it was trained on public chat GBT outputs, which would mean it just was copied. But you're saying it goes beyond that. There's real innovation. They've trained about 14.8 trillion tokens. The internet has so much chat GBT. If you actually go to any LinkedIn post or X post now, most of the comments are written by AI. You can just see it. People are just trying to write.
In fact, even with an X, there's like a grok tweet enhancer or in LinkedIn, there's an AI enhancer. Or in Google Docs and Word, there are AI tools to rewrite your stuff. So if you do something there and copy paste somewhere on the internet, it's naturally going to have some elements of a chat GBT training, right? And there's a lot of people who don't even bother to strip away that I'm a language model part. So they just based it somewhere. And it's very difficult to control for this. I think XAI has spoken about this too. I wouldn't disregard their technical accomplishment just because for some prompts, like who are you or which model are you with response to that?
It doesn't even matter in my opinion. For a long time, we thought, I don't know if you agreed with us, China was behind in AI. What does this do to that race? Can we say that China is catching up or has it caught up? I mean, if we say the matter is catching up to open AI and in the topic, if you make that claim, then the same claim can be made for China catching up to America. There are a lot of papers from China that have tried to replicate 01. In fact, I saw more papers from China after 01 announcement that tried to replicate it than from America. And the amount of compute deep-seak has access to is roughly similar to what PhD students in the US have access to. So it's not meant to criticize others, even for ourselves. For perplexity, we decided not to train models because we thought it's a very expensive thing. We thought there's no way to catch up with the rest.
Will you incorporate deep-seak into perplexity? We already are beginning to use it. I think they have an API and they have open source of it so we can host it ourselves too. It's good to try to start using that because it actually allows us to do a lot of the things at a lower cost. But what I'm thinking is beyond that, which is, okay, if these guys actually could train such a great model, good team, and there's no excuse anymore for companies from the US, including ourselves to not try to do something like that. You hear a lot in public from a lot of thought leaders and generative AI, both on the research side, on the entrepreneurial side. Like Elon Musk and others say that China can't catch up. The stakes are too big. The geopolitical stakes, whoever dominates AI is going to dominate the economy, dominate the world. It's been talked about in those massive terms.
Are you worried about what China proved it was able to do? Firstly, I don't know if Elon ever said China couldn't catch up. I'm not a great person. Just the threat of China. He's only identified the threat of letting China. Sam Altman has said similar things. We can't let China win. He ever is. You know, it's all, I think you got a decouple of what someone like Sam says to like, what is in his self interest, right? Look, I think the, my point is like, whatever you did to a lot of let them catch up didn't even matter. They ended up catching up anyway. The necessity is the mother of invention, like he said. And you, it's actually, you know, what's more dangerous than trying to do all the things to like, not let them catch up with. And like, you know, all the stuff is what's more dangerous is they have the best open source model and all the American developers are building on that. Right. That's more dangerous because then they get to own the mind share, the ecosystem. The entire American AI ecosystem.
你是否担心中国所展示的能力?首先,我不知道埃隆是否曾说过中国无法赶上。我不是个很棒的人。只是对中国的威胁。他只是指出中国可能带来的威胁。Sam Altman 也说过类似的话。我们不能让中国赢。不管他是谁。你知道,我认为你需要将像 Sam 这样的人说的话与他们的个人利益区分开来。看,我的观点是,不管你做了什么以阻止他们赶上,这些都不重要。最终他们还是赶上了。就像他所说的,需求是发明之母。而且,你知道,实际上,比起竭力阻止他们赶上,更危险的是他们拥有最好的开源模型,而所有美国的开发者都在基于此进行开发。这更危险,因为这样他们能掌控思想的影响力和整个生态系统。整个美国的 AI 生态系统。
Look, in general, it's known that once open source is caught up or improved over closed source software, all developers migrate to that. Right. It's historically known, right? When llama was being built and becoming more widely used, there was this question, should we trust Zuckerberg? But now the question is, should we trust China? That's a very. You trust open source. That's, that's the, like it's not about who is it Zuckerberg or is it. Does it matter then if it's Chinese, if it's open source? It doesn't matter in the sense that you still have full control. You run it as your own, like, like set of weights on your own computer. You are in charge of the model. But it's not a great look for our own like talent to like, you know, rely on software to pay others. Even if it's open source, there's always like a point where open source can stop being open source too. Right. So the licenses are very favorable today. But if you close that. Exactly. Over time, they can always change the license. So it's important that we actually have people here in America building and that's why matter is so important. Like I, look, I still think matter will build a better model than deep seek between an open source and what they'll call it llama four or three points something. Doesn't matter. I think what is more key is that we don't like try to focus all our energy on banning them and stopping them and just try to out compete and win them. That's just the American we were doing things. Just be better. And it feels like there's, you know, we hear a lot more about these Chinese companies who are developing a similar way a lot more efficiently, a lot more cost effectively, right? Yeah.
Again, like, look, it's hard to fake scarcity, right? If you raise 10 billion and you are decided to spend 80% of it on a computer cluster, it's hard for you to come up with the exact same solution that someone with five million would do. And there's no point in no need to like sort of be rate those or putting more money. They're trying to do it as fast as they can. When we say open source, there's so many different versions. Some people criticize meta for not publishing everything and even deep seek itself. It's a totally transparent. Sure. Yeah. So open source and say, I should exactly be able to replicate your training run. But first of all, how many people even have the resources to do that and compare like, I think the amount of detail they've shared in the technical report actually meta did that too, by the way, meta's llama 3.3 technical report is incredibly detailed and very great for science. So the amount of details these people are sharing is already a lot more than what the other companies are doing right now. When you think about how much it costs deep seek to do this, less than $6 million, think about what open AI has spent to develop GPT models. What does that mean for the close source model, ecosystem trajectory, momentum? What does it mean for open AI? I mean, it's very clear that we'll have like an open source version for or even better than that and much cheaper than that open source like completely into the sphere. Made by open AI? Probably not. And I don't think they care if it's not made by them. I think they've already moved to a new paradigm called the 01 family of models. I can't like Ilya Sutsky, where Kim said, pre-training is a wall, right? So I mean, he didn't exactly use the word, but he clearly said there is a pre-training is a word. Many people have said that. Right? That doesn't mean scaling instead of all. I think we're scaling on different dimensions now.
The amount of time model spends thinking at test time, reinforcement learning, trying to make the model, okay, if it doesn't know what to do for a new prompt, it will go and reason and collect data and interact with the world, use a bunch of tools. I think that's where things are headed. And I feel like opening is more focused on that right now. Yeah. Instead of just the bigger, better model reasoning capacities. But didn't you say that deep-sea is likely to turn their attention to reasoning? 100%. I think they will. And that's why I'm pretty excited about what they'll produce next. I guess that's that my question is sort of what's opening eyes mode now?
Well, I still think that no one else has produced a system similar to the 01 yet, exactly. I know that there's debates about whether 01 is actually worth it. Maybe a few prompts, it's really better, but most of the times it's not producing any differentiated output from SONAT. But at least the results they showed in 013 where they had competitive coding performance and almost like an AI software engineer level. Isn't it just a matter of time though before the internet is felt with reasoning data that deep-sea? Again, it's possible. Nobody knows yet. Yeah. SONAT, it's still uncertain. Right. So maybe that uncertainty is their mode that LinkedIn knows has the same reasoning capability yet. But will by end of this year, will there be multiple players, even in the reasoning arena? I absolutely think so. So are we seeing the quantitization of large language models? I think we'll see a similar trajectory, just like how in pre-training and post-training that sort of system for getting commoditized, where this year will be a lot more commoditization there. I think the reasoning kind of models will go through a similar trajectory, where in the beginning, one or two players will know how to do it, but over time like.
That's in who knows, right? Because OpenAI could make another advancement to focus on. Correct. But it's not easy to use it against their modes. But if advancements keep happening again and again and again, I think the meaning of the word advancement also loses some of its value. Totally. Even now, it's very difficult, right? Because there's pre-training advancements. Yeah. And then we've moved into a different phase. Yeah. So what is guaranteed to happen is what are models exist today? That level of reasoning, that level of multimodal capability, in like five to ten X cheaper models, open source, all that's going to happen. It's just a matter of time. What is unclear is if something like a model that reasons it at this time will be extremely cheap enough that we can just just all run it on our phones. I think that's not clear to me yet.
It feels like so much of the landscape has changed with what DeepSik was able to prove. Could you call it China's chat GBT moment? It's possible. I mean, I think it's only probably gave them a lot of confidence that we're not really behind. No matter what you do to restrict our compute, we can always figure out some workarounds. And I'm sure the team feels pumped about the results. How does this change the investment landscape, the hyperscalers that are spending tens of billions of dollars a year on CapEx? They've just ramped it up huge and open AI and anthropic that are raising billions of dollars for GPUs, essentially.
What DeepSik told us is you don't need. You don't necessarily need that. Yeah. I mean, look, I think it's very clear that they're going to go even harder on reasoning because they understand that whatever they were building the previous two years is getting extremely cheap, but it doesn't make sense to go justify raising that amount of time. Funding proposition the same. Do they need the same amount of high-end GPUs or can you reason using the lower-end ones that DeepSik has already? Yeah, it's hard to say no until proven it's not. But I guess in the spirit of moving fast, you would want to use the high-end chips and you would want to move faster than your competitors.
I think the best talent still wants to work in the team that made it happen first. There's always some glory to who did this actually, who's the real pioneer versus who's fast follow, right? That was like Sam Altman's tweet, kind of veiled response to what DeepSik has been able to. He kind of implied that they just copied and anyone can copy, right? Yeah, but then you can always say that everybody copies everybody in this field. You can say Google did the transform first. It's not open AI and open AI just copied it. Google built the first large language models.
They didn't prioritize it, but open AI did it into productized way. You can say all this in many ways. It doesn't matter. I remember asking you being like, why don't you want to build the model? Yeah, I know. That's the glory. A year later, just one year later, you are very, very smart to not engage in that extremely expensive race that has become so competitive. You have this lead now in what everyone wants to see now, which is real-world applications, killer applications of generative AI. Talk a little bit about that decision and how that guided you where you see perplexity going from here.
Look, one year ago, I don't even think we had something like this is what like 2024 beginning, right? I feel like we didn't even have something like Son of 3.5. We had GPT-4, I believe, and it was kind of nobody else was able to catch up to it. But there was no multi-model, nothing. My sense was like, okay, if people with way more resources and way more talent cannot catch up, it's very difficult to play that game. So let's play a different game. Anyway, people want to use these models. There's one use case of asking questions and getting accurate answers with sources with real-time information, accurate information. There's still a lot of work there to do outside the model and making sure the product works reliably, keep scaling it up to usage, keep building custom UIs.
看,一年前,我们甚至没有类似这样的东西——好像是2024年年初,对吧?我感觉我们甚至没有类似于Son of 3.5的东西。我相信我们有GPT-4,而且当时似乎没有其他人能够赶上它。但是我们没有多模态模型,什么都没有。我的感觉是,如果拥有更多资源和人才的人都难以赶上,那玩这个游戏就非常困难。所以我们去玩一个不同的游戏。不过呢,人们想使用这些模型,有一种用例是提问并获得带有来源的准确答案和实时信息。模型之外还有很多工作要做,要确保产品可靠地运行,持续扩大使用规模,并且不断构建定制的用户界面。
There's just a lot of work to do and we will focus on that and we will benefit from all the tailwinds of models getting better and better. That's essentially what happened. In fact, I would say Son of 3.5 made our products so good in the sense that if you use Son of 3.5 as the model choice within perplexity, it's very difficult to find a hallucination.
有很多工作要做,我们将专注于此,并会从模型不断改善的利好中受益。基本上,这就是发生的情况。事实上,我想说Son of 3.5让我们的产品变得非常出色,因为如果在perplexity中选择Son of 3.5作为模型,几乎很难找到幻觉现象。
I'm not saying it's impossible, but it dramatically reduced the rate of hallucinations, which meant the problem of question answering, asking a question and getting an answer, doing fact checks, research, going and asking anything out there because almost all the information is on the web was such a big unlock and that helped us grow 10x over the course of the year in terms of usage. You've made huge strides in terms of users and we here on Steam BCL a lot, big investors who are huge fans. Jensen Wong himself, right? He mentioned it in his keynote the other night. It's a pretty regular user. He's not just saying it.
He's actually a pretty regular user. So a year ago, we weren't even talking about monetization because you guys were just so new and you wanted to get yourselves out there and build some scale, but now you are looking at things like that increasingly in ad model, right? Yeah, we're experimenting with it. I know, like, does some controversy on why should we do ads? Whether you can have a truthful answer engine despite having ads?
In my opinion, we've been pretty proactively talked about it where we said, okay, as long as the answer is always accurate, unbiased and not corrupted by someone's advertising budget, only you get to see some sponsored questions and even the answers to those sponsored questions are not influenced by them. And questions are also like, you know, I'm not picked in a way where it's manipulative.
Sure. There's some things that the advertisers also want, which is they want you to know about their brand and they want you to know the best parts of their brand, just like how you will go and what if you're introducing yourself to someone you want them to see the best parts of your ad. So that's all there. But you're still going to have to click on a sponsored question. You can ignore it. And we are only charging them CPM right now.
So we are still not even incentivized to make you click yet. So I think considering all this, we're actually trying to get it right long term instead of going the Google way of forcing you to click on links. I remember when people were talking about the commoditization of models a year ago and you thought, oh, it was controversial, but now it's not controversial. It's kind of like that's happening.
Yeah. You've keeping your eye on that. It's smart. But we benefit a lot from model commoditization, except we also need to figure out something to offer to the paid users, like a more sophisticated research agent that can do like multi-step reasoning, go and do like 15 minutes worth of searching and give you like an analysis, an analyst type of answer. All that's going to come. All that's going to stay in the product.
Nothing changes there. But there's a ton of questions every free user asks day to day basis that needs to be quick fast answers. It shouldn't be slow. And all that will be free. Whether you like it or not, it has to be free. That's what people are used to. And that means figuring out a way to make that free traffic also monetizable.
So you're not trying to change user habits, but it's interesting because you are trying to teach new habits to advertisers. They can't have everything that they have in a Google, 10 blue links search. What's the response been from them so far? Are they willing to accept some of the trade offs? Yeah. I mean, that's why they are trying stuff. Like Intuit is working with us. And then there's many other brands.
All these people are working with us to test. They're also excited about it. Look, everyone knows whether it's like it or not, 5 to 10 years from now. Most people are going to be asking AI's, most of the things, and not on the traditional search engine. Everybody understands that. So everybody wants to be early adopters of the new platforms, new UX, and learn from it.
And then we'll come together, not like they're not viewing it as like, okay, you guys go figure out everything else and then we'll come later. I'm smiling because it goes back perfectly to the point you made when you first sat down today, which is necessity is the mother of all invention, right? And that's what advertisers are essentially looking at. They're saying this field is changing. We have to learn to adapt with it.