Already a month into 2025, now we observe two prominent chatbots that have garnered significant attention: OpenAI's ChatGPT and China's DeepSeek. While both serve as conversational AI models, they differ in several key aspects/
Development Philosophy and Accessibility
ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, operates on a proprietary model, with access often gated behind subscription services or usage fees. In contrast, DeepSeek has embraced an open-source approach, making its models freely available to the public. This democratization of AI technology allows a broader range of developers and organizations to utilize and build upon DeepSeek's capabilities without significant financial barriers.
Usage of GPUs
DeepSeek's V3 model was trained using approximately 2,000 GPUs over 55 days, incurring a cost of around $5.58 million. In comparison, leading AI companies often employ supercomputers with upwards of 16,000 GPUs, resulting in substantially higher costs. DeepSeek's ability to achieve competitive performance with fewer resources challenges the prevailing notion that cutting-edge AI development necessitates vast computational power and investment.
Censorship and Content Moderation
An area where DeepSeek and ChatGPT diverge is in content moderation. DeepSeek's API version, hosted on servers in China, incorporates censorship mechanisms that restrict discussions on topics deemed politically sensitive by the Chinese government. In contrast, ChatGPT, while also implementing content moderation to prevent harmful or inappropriate outputs, does not exhibit the same level of political censorship, reflecting differing governance and regulatory environments.
Security and Privacy Concerns
DeepSeek's data handling practices have raised security and privacy concerns. The platform stores user data on servers located within China and specifies that it may collect various forms of user input, including text, audio, and uploaded files. This has led to apprehensions about potential government surveillance and data privacy, especially given China's regulatory landscape. ChatGPT also collects user data to improve its services but is subject to different legal frameworks and scrutiny, particularly concerning user privacy in Western countries.
The so called sideproject is already making shocks all around the world, Be sure to mention in the comments what other technologies are you excited about in 2025.
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