DeepSeek triggers shock waves for AI giants, but the disruption won’t last

John Belton, a portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds, an asset management firm whose funds include shares of Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and others, said DeepSeek’s achievements are real, but some of the company’s claims are misleading.

“No, you cannot recreate DeepSeek with $6 million and the extent to which they distilled existing models (took shortcuts potentially without license) is an unknown,” Belton said via email to Computerworld. “However, they have made key breakthroughs that show how to reduce training and inference costs.”

Belton also pointed out that DeepSeek isn’t new. Its creator, Liang Wenfeng, a hedge fund manager and AI enthusiast, published a paper on the performance breakthroughs more than a month ago and released a model with similar methods a year ago.