Why Chinese AI has stunned the world
DeepSeek’s models are much cheaper and almost as good as American rivals
THE WORLD’s first “reasoning model”, an advanced form of artificial intelligence, was released in September by OpenAI, an American firm. o1, as it is called, uses a “chain of thought” to answer difficult questions in science and mathematics, breaking down problems to their constituent steps and testing various approaches to the task behind the scenes before presenting a conclusion to the user. Its unveiling set off a race to copy this method. Google came up with a reasoning model called “Gemini Flash Thinking” in December. OpenAI responded with o3, an update of o1, a few days later.
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This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline “Uncomfortably close”
Briefing
January 25th 2025
From the January 25th 2025 edition
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