DeepSeek rocks the AI boat, but few in publishing shed tears
A roller coaster week at the cutting edge of tech has caused a surreal blend of consternation and delight.
What in the name of God's bananas has happened this week?
A guy who is primarily interested in using Machine Learning to predict market behaviours has caused a market shift that no one, using flesh or silicon, could predict.
OpenAI, a company founded as a non-profit which collected a great deal of money for exclusive use as a non-profit, before becoming a for-profit, has been leapfrogged by an open source project created and given away by that most piratical of capitalist endeavours, a hedge fund.
Open AI, a company which has spent years harvesting other people's content without much regard to its creation or ownership is now crying foul that someone has stolen their IP.
Did we miss anything else in the DeepSeek saga?
Possibly. It was known by the AI cognoscenti that DeepSeek's Chinese researchers were progressing rapidly a year ago. Curiously, news of their progress seems to have been delayed akin to a medieval monarch receiving messengers from a distant battle. Informed folk were enthusiastically flagging the processing improvements seen in DeepSeek's model V3 at the back end of last year.
Why then, four weeks later, are we suddenly plunged into a multi-level frenzy about the capabilities of its newest model only after technosage/investor Marc Andreesen posted that "DeepSeek-R1 is AI’s Sputnik moment"?
It's all a little perplexing and it seems doubly so for Wall Street, which has been flinging money at technology most investors don't understand in the hope more money is spat out from the other end of this wondrous digital confection.
It seems that rather than investing in artificial intelligence, a little more in the way of market intelligence would have been useful.
The simple answer is that a hype train is rumbling down the tracks, and woe to those in its way. It's a shame, because it's harder to have a calm discussion about AI systems with all the noise and juddering that is the signature of a hype train's transit.
More noise, less understanding
In the UK where I am, and likely in much of the developed world, it doesn't help that we have effortlessly transitioned from a generation of politicians who knew nothing about new technology, and let Big Tech get away with numerous horrors, to a generation of politicians who feel they must pontificate broadly and frequently on tech, despite largely matching the same vacuum of understanding as their predecessors.
The truth behind DeepSeek's success is still cloudy.
Did they actually use a stockpile of inferior Nvidia H800 chips and come up with a superior solution requiring less compute power?
Did founder Liang Wenfeng use a team of young developers unfettered by conventional thinking to outfox less adventurous rivals?
Have DeepSeek made a mockery of the previous US administration's "small yard, high fence" attempts to protect critical technological know-how?
Perhaps for our own publishing industry, a moment of schadenfreude can be taken from OpenAI's statement that they believed DeepSeek had "distilled" data taken from ChatGPT.
Refreshingly for those of us who have to force ourselves to understand technical terminology, "distilling" in this case resembles distilling in the more usual sense: certain data is separated out from a larger mass of data, and then used in its more concentrated form. In this case, the "larger mass of data" belongs to OpenAI and they say DeepSeek used ChatGPT's outputs to train.
Forgive us all for not crying, but as one observer put it, "I'm so sorry I can't stop laughing. OpenAI, the company built on stealing literally the entire internet, is crying because DeepSeek may have trained on the outputs from ChatGPT."
As my colleague and fellow Content Aware botherer Rich put it a couple of weeks ago, "the OpenAI pot [seems] unable to call the rival kettle black because to do so might prejudice its defence in separate legal matters."
Will they sue, we all ask.
As it turns out, distillation is a known method of producing lower cost LLMs, which use data from larger and hence pricier models, and reduce the large model to a smaller one, which then operates on this tighter set of data, while using the larger model's reasoning capabilities.
If they did do that without an OpenAI licence, then DeepSeek have simply learned from the masters of data harvesting. It's a competitive world, Mr Altman, and price matters.
We’re thrilled to announce our latest integration partnership with digital solutions provider Impelsys!
Through this collaboration, Impelsys will integrate our headless Content Management System, Glide CMS, into its own digital solution ecosystem to provide publishers, media, and content-rich brands a unified platform that addresses critical challenges in delivering user-centric digital experiences, tackling:
Fragmented workflows
Slow time-to-market
The complexities of delivering multi-channel content
Click here for more on this integration partnership.
How Which? conquered TikTok
Is TikTok a channel for you? Need some tips? Assuming it doesn’t get banned, check out tips from Hannah Ballantyne of UK icon Which?, who talks about how the rights and reviews publication turned the social channel into a major new route to audiences. Is it working? Well, the view count has topped 50m, and the plaudits are flowing, including Best Use of Social Media at the 2024 British Society of Magazine Editors Awards. Kudos!
Read
Metro's winning Reddit strategy
In a similar theme, London title Metro gives insight into using social site Reddit as an audience channel. They talk about bans, popularity, shifting focus from large to niche communities, and building relationship.
Read
Quartz's AI newsroom: cutting corners or cutting-edge?
Business title Quartz dipped its tow into AI-generated articles - to mixed reactions. Its “Quartz Intelligence Newsroom” bot summarises other sites’ work, compressing them into shorter pieces without quotes or much in the way of meat. Is this a case of doing what the likes of Google do? Their defence is that it frees their staff to real original journalism.
Read
Perplexity AI eyes TikTok
The competition for TikTok's US operations intensifies, with content thieves/AI nice guys (delete as appropriate) Perplexity AI making a surprise bid. Their proposal has a twist, suggesting the creation of a new company involving TikTok US, ByteDance, and the US government. Their content deals with publishers might be old hat if they land this source of training data.
Read
Google to tackle UK fake reviews
Following pressure from the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), Google will implement changes to combat fake reviews, including warnings and deactivation for repeat offenders. While this is a positive step towards transparency, effective enforcement will be key.
Read
Newsweek's $90M revenue surge signals historic turnaround
In celebration of its 93rd anniversary, Newsweek reported a notable $90 million in revenue, marking a significant and impressive resurgence in its commercial performance. Dig into the reasons here.
Read
Google on the hunt for white-label sites in Europe
Google is targeting white-label sites in Europe, low quality sites rustled up to harvest ad cash and search-based traffic. Good news indeed, especially in light of growing concerns over the credibility and reliability of news sources.
Read
SEO, friends, and awards
In case you're in the mood to win awards, make haste and register for the Friends of Search awards. One more day left!
Read