3 min readNew DelhiJan 31, 2025 08:13 AM IST
First published on: Jan 30, 2025 at 06:15 PM IST
In a week’s time, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has raked in praise and criticism in equal measure. While the company has been lauded for its ability to come up with a state-of-the-art AI model at a fraction of the cost of OpenAI’s frontier models, it’s not all good news. One of the godfathers of modern AI, Yoshua Bengio, believes that DeepSeek and other similar disruptors in AI could aggravate the safety risks posed by such technology.
Bengio, in an interview with The Guardian, expressed that advances by DeepSeek could be a worrying development in a field that has been dominated by the US for a long time. The 60-year-old winner of the Turing award said that the DeepSeek development signals a closer race, which according to him is not a good thing from the point of view of AI safety.
Bengio explained that American companies and their Chinese rivals like DeepSeek could likely focus more on leading in the AI race than emphasising the safety aspect of it. Incidentally, in the wake of the launch of DeepSeek’s AI models, Sam Altman, while acknowledging the merits of the Chinese startup, vowed to deliver ‘much better models’.
Bengio told the British daily that in a competition between two entities, one may think they are way ahead and that they can afford to be ‘more prudent and still know that they will stay ahead’. “Whereas if you have a competition between two entities and they think that the other is just at the same level, then they need to accelerate. Then, maybe they don’t give as much attention to safety,” the renowned computer scientist was quoted as saying.
DeepSeek broke into the mainstream earlier this month after it released its model DeepSeek-V3 which it claimed to have surpassed the capabilities of OpenAI’s GPT-4o on several benchmarks. The company claimed that it trained the model for a meagre $5 million, a stark contrast to the $100 million reportedly spent by OpenAI on GPT-4o.
Days later, the company also introduced their reasoning model DeepSeek-R1 which has outdone OpenAI-o1 on several performance benchmarks like mathematics, coding, general knowledge, etc. However, the most distinguishing aspect of DeepSeek has been the company has released AI models that are open-source, meaning developers and engineers can build on them. Whereas, OpenAI’s AI models are closed. DeepSeek AI models have been winning accolades for implementing newer techniques to gain maximum efficiency with limited resources.
The logo of DeepSeek is displayed alongside its AI assistant app on a mobile phone, in this illustration picture taken January 28, 2025. (File Photo: REUTERS/Florence Lo) 
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