Yang, who serves as associate dean for global engagement at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, said at a forum last Tuesday that the Hangzhou-based company was relatively “free from [commercial] product and business pressures, which are a constant concern” for Big Tech firms.
DeepSeek was purely engaged “in developing AI large models”, she said at the event “DeepSeek and Beyond” held at PolyU.
Her assessment partly echoes the view of Alibaba Group Holding chairman Joe Tsai, who said in Dubai last month that DeepSeek’s breakthrough in developing cheap-but-high-performing large language models (LLMs) was “quite significant” and could inspire more AI developers to focus on open-source solutions. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
LLMs are the technology underpinning generative AI assistants like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DeepSeek’s namesake chatbot.
Open source gives public access to a program’s source code, allowing third-party software developers to modify or share its design, fix broken links or scale up their capabilities.
