Deepseek: the proof that open source is better

Deepseek: the proof that open source is better.

I have been a huge champion of open source since I was in high school. The concept of avoiding reinventing the wheel every time made sense to me. Building new things on top of the existing ones creates a formidable virtuous cycle of development.

However, when I entered the professional ranks, the company were not very attuned to open source, but they spoke of IP protection and patents. No sharing, no general improvement, but a single profit. 

Although I understand the reasoning of these companies and the overall society, I always thought another option was available.

Many projects have shown the power of open source throughout the years. Linux, Apache, Kubernetes, and Pytorch are just a few of

amazing open-source initiatives that are wildly adopted and uncontested.

They are used by users and companies alike, but they still maintain their underlying open philosophy. Transparency and collaboration are the two values at the core of it.

In recent years, the AI landscape has seen a wave of open-source new models and methods. This injection boosted the development of even better networks, and if you are following the new trends, you realise that the obsolescence time is measured in weeks.

Chatgpt was one the biggest helms fighting against the flow. They provide the most advanced LLMs to the public but without giving full transparency of the model reasoning and weight.

Deepseek breaks this barrier, it does it while obtaining an astonishing reduction of the resources necessary for training and with incredible performance. (The How is also interesting, but maybe another post is necessary for that :))

The capability to have a glimpse of the Inception process and have a clear line of reasoning is essential to make these technologies more and more understood.

I am looking forward to the rekindled interest in open source, and I'll look closely at what new ideas will spin out from Deekseek and others (Alibaba claims to have an even better model!)