By Tasmin Lockwood

Copyright cnbc

DeepSeek, however, says the experimental model works on par with its V3.1-Terminus. Despite speculation of a bubble forming, AI remains at the centre of geopolitical competition with the U.S. and China vying for the winning spot. Yakefu noted that DeepSeek’s models work “right out of the box” with Chinese-made AI chips, such as Ascend and Cambricon, meaning they can run locally on domestic hardware without any extra setup.

DeepSeek also shared the actual programming code and tools needed to use the experimental model, she said. “This means other people can learn from it and build their own improvements.”

But for Almasque, the very nature of this means the tech may not be defensible. “The approach is not super new,” she said, noting the industry has been “talking about sparse models since 2015” and that DeepSeek is not able to patent its technology due to being open source. DeepSeek’s competitive edge, therefore, must lie in how it decides what information to include, she added.

The company itself acknowledges V3.2-Exp is an “intermediate step toward our next-generation architecture,” per the Hugging Face post.

As Patience pointed out, “this is DeepSeek’s value prop all over: efficiency is becoming as important as raw power.”

“DeepSeek is playing the long game to keep the community invested in their progress,” Yakefu added. “People will always go for what is cheap, reliable, and effective.”