When Chinese entrepreneur Liang Wenfeng revealed DeepSeek’s newest app to the world earlier this month, most people had never even heard of the artificial intelligence company. But the new app took the world by storm, as many in the tech community marveled at how DeepSeek functioned at a fraction of the cost of other large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. That’s presumably good news for the environment, as many have criticized the AI craze as being extremely taxing on electrical grids — so much so that some tech companies like Google and Meta have reopened coal plants.

In theory, any AI alternative that consumes fewer resources should be better for the environment. Yet when Salon reached out to experts about the potential promise in DeepSeek’s potential “Sputnik” moment (to quote billionaire software developer Marc Andreessen), they expressed cautious optimism.

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“There is almost no information available about either ChatGPT or DeepSeek, so any numbers [about their environmental impact] are speculation,” David Rolnick, an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University, told Salon. “It's unlikely that there is a massive difference between these two algorithms, but it's hard to say the biggest differences in terms of the energy consumption aspects of large AI algorithms are how much you use.”

That said, DeepSeek could still represent a step in the right direction, at least in terms of sustainability. Climate scientists  are rightfully worried about the

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