There's a Whale in the Room

I wasn't going to 'dive in'.*

*Excuse 1) the terrible pun and 2) me using a phrase that appears far too often in AI-generated social media sludge. But you know, it works on several levels.

Anyway, back to the point, there's a flipping big whale in the room.

And nope, I wasn't going to post - there are way too many AI 'experts' riding the DeepSeek slipstream (I'm doing it again). That's kind of my point.

Just now, I made the mistake of sticking a UK lunchtime politics show on as I threw down some leftover Thai curry. Four 'politicians' were peddling ill-informed conjecture on the rise of DeepSeek to swerve a discussion to their particular agenda. And yes, I should know by now that’s what we call a mistake for political discourse in the West these days....

Suffice to say it wasn't the curry that made my noggin hit boiling point.

Everything they said, and to be honest, practically everything everybody else in the media has said about DeepSeek in the last 24 hours entirely misses the point.

“It’s better.”

That’s kind of it, folks, if you listen to the pundits on TV. “It’s better.”

It's Better. Haven't You Heard?

And I have ZERO doubt in my mind that the chatter across thousands of boardrooms and offices around the world, right now, is, “We need to use DeepSeek. It’s better.”

Yup. It is a technological marvel:

• Developed with a fraction of the budgets available to its US rivals, DeepSeek has built a model capable of ‘chain of thought’ reasoning, just like OpenAI’s o1 (o2 and o3) models.

• It’s open source, meaning the model is accessible to anyone wanting to develop on and for it.

• The app is free to use, and the APIs are drastically cheaper if you’re building solutions that call them. (Hey, but we all know that when a service is free, YOU are the product).

• And it’s efficient: training and operating DeepSeek is vastly cheaper than its rivals

....and so in many ways, DeepSeek is astonishing.

Hmmm...But Is It Better For You?

But for you, right now, is it BETTER, as the ‘experts’ in the media would have you think? In my honest opinion, as an AI enthusiast helping companies get their head around this stuff:

• I’d argue that if you haven’t yet found much use for reasoning models, it isn’t better for you.

• I’d argue that if you’re not deploying apps that are built on APIs, it isn’t better for you.

• I’d argue that if you value the option to protect your data from training models, it isn’t better for you.

• And I’d argue that if you’re using the under-the-hood features that tools like ChatGPT offer, such as voice, true image parsing, Canvas for document and code editing, then it isn’t better for you.

The one thing we know about the development of AI tools is that change is constant.

It’s an arms race, where one vendor inches beyond another every week depending on any given set of metrics. And sure, DeepSeek has made a ‘big splash’ (sorry, I’m at it again), but from a business perspective, I worry that we get buoyed along (I’ll get my coat) without fully understanding the true differences between one platform and another, and in particular, what that means for us - right now.

Right. Back to my curry then.

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Interested? Let’s have that chat, one-to-one.