DeepSeek’s Breakthrough: The Political, Economic, and Technical Earthquake in AI

Author(s): Maxime Jabarian

Originally published on Towards AI.

This member-only story is on us. Upgrade to access all of Medium.

AI is no longer just about technology, it’s about power, politics, and who gets to shape the future. DeepSeek’s breakthrough last week isn’t just a technical achievement, it’s a geopolitical and economic earthquake. With a fraction of the cost and compute used by industry giants like OpenAI and Anthropic, DeepSeek has proven that bigger isn’t always better and that Open-Source AI can compete at the highest level. But the impact doesn’t stop there. DeepSeek’s rise has sparked heated debates on AI sustainability, intellectual property, and the future of Open-Source research. It’s also challenging everything we thought we knew about reinforcement learning and AI reasoning.

If you’re not a member you can read it here.

📌 How RL is revolutionizing AI reasoning — why models like DeepSeek-R1-Zero and Kimi k1.5 outperform traditional LLMs.

📌 The mechanics behind RL-driven AI training — how it produces self-correcting, emergent behaviors.

📌 Prompting insights from DeepSeek — showing why we’ve been using the wrong strategies when working with RL-based models.

📌 The role of Open-Source AI in driving innovation — why industry leaders are divided on its future.

📌 AI sustainability — how DeepSeek proved that cutting-edge AI doesn’t have… Read the full blog for free on Medium.

Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming a sponsor.

Published via Towards AI