When it comes to AI, I’d consider myself a casual user and a curious one. It’s been creeping into my daily life for a couple of years, and at the very least, AI chatbots can be good at making drudgery slightly less drudgerous.

But whenever I start to feel convinced that tools like ChatGPT and Claude can actually make my life better, I seem to hit a paywall, because the most advanced and arguably most useful tools require a subscription. Then came DeepSeek.

The Chinese startup DeepSeek sunk the stock prices of several major tech companies on Monday after it released a new open-source model that can reason on the cheap: DeepSeek-R1. The company says R1’s performance matches OpenAI’s initial “reasoning” model, o1, and it does so using a fraction of the resources. It also cost a lot less to use. That adds up to an advanced AI model that’s free to the public and a bargain to developers who want to build apps on top of it.

While OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have collectively spent billions of dollars training their models, DeepSeek claims it spent less than $6 million on using the equipment to train R1’s predecessor, DeepSeek-V3. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that has signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

To get unlimited access to OpenAI’s o1, you’ll need a pro account, which costs $200 a month. DeepSeek does charge companies for access to its application programming interface (API), which allows apps to talk to each other and helps developers bake AI models into their apps. But what DeepSeek charges for API access is a tiny fraction of the cost that OpenAI charges for access to o1. So it might not come as a surprise that, as of Wednesday morning, DeepSeek wasn’t just the most popular AI app in the Apple and Google app stores. It was the most popular app, period.

“The main reason people are very excited about DeepSeek is not because it’s way better than any of the other models,” said Leandro von Werra, head of research at the AI platform Hugging Face. “It’s more that it’s an open model, and coming from a place where people didn’t expect it to come from.”

So as Silicon Valley and Washington pondered the geopolitical implications of what’s been called a “Sputnik moment” for AI, I’ve been fixated on the promise that AI tools can be both powerful and cheap. And on top of that, I imagined how a future powered by artificially intelligent software could be built on the same open-source principles that brought us things like Linux and the World Web Web.

This could be wishful thinking and a little bit naive. After all, OpenAI was originally founded as a nonprofit company with the mission to create AI that would serve the entire world, regardless of financial return. That’s no longer the case.

But this is why DeepSeek’s explosive entrance into the global AI arena could make my wishful thinking a bit more realistic. While my own experiments with the R1 model showed a chatbot that basically acts like other chatbots — while walking you through its reasoning, which is interesting —........

© Vox