DeepSeek has been great for competition, but horrible for ai literacy.

I have never dealt with so much misunderstanding of ai tech by regular people in all of my time following ai, and it is coming from EVERYONE. They all have been made to believe that reinforcement learning, test time compute, mixture of experts, and the ability to run on a raspberry pi are all new and unique to DeepSeek when the reality is that all these things have been around for a very long time! It’s very weird to have people in my life who previously didn’t follow ai suddenly talk to me about how amazing mixture of experts in DeepSeek is because they watched the new computerphile video about it.

Don’t get me wrong, DeepSeek is good, but it is not frontier research and it feels like the general public has been made to believe that it is.

Edit: Thanks for all the discussion! To clarify, when i say “frontier research” I am specifically referring to performance advances. DeepSeek may be cheaper and open weights, but they are not really pushing the boundary of performance (yet).

I’d also like to note that while it is a good thing for people to be more aware of how ai models work, false attribution of these advances erodes public/investor trust in the ai labs who are actually making breakthroughs.