DeepSeek continues to receive high praise, this time from a Nobel laureate. Demis Hassabis, the head of Google’s AI research lab DeepMind, praised the AI model developed by the Chinese startup as “an impressive piece of work.”
“I think it’s probably the best work I’ve seen come out of China,” Hassabis reportedly said at an event hosted by Google ahead of the Paris AI Action Summit.
He said that DeepSeek’s success is due to “extremely good engineering” and that it “changes things on a geopolitical scale.”
Last month, DeepSeek claimed that it has developed its open-source, reasoning AI model called R1 at a fraction of the cost of leading AI players and on less-advanced Nvidia chips.
The announcement triggered a broader stock sell-off in global markets and sent shock waves across the tech industry.
However, Hassabis opined that the hype around DeepSeek has been “exaggerated a little bit.” “Despite the hype, there’s no actual new scientific advance … it’s using known techniques [in AI],” he said.
Hassabis also said that the tech industry was on the path towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), that is, an AI system exhibiting all the cognitive capabilities of humans.
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“I think we’re close now, you know, maybe we are only, you know, perhaps 5 years or something away from a system like that which would be pretty extraordinary,” Hassabis said.
“And I think society needs to get ready for that and what implications that will have. And, you know, make sure that we derive the benefits from that and the whole society benefits from that, but also we mitigate some of the risks, too,” he further said.
On AI regulation, Hassabis said, “It’s important to regulate AI but it’s important to get the regulations right. That’s hard when the technology itself is not fully understood and so fast-moving […] There needs to be international cooperation around that, which is also tricky in the current environment.”
He added that events like the Paris AI Action Summit play an important role in bringing together industry, academia, civil society, and governments together.
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