DeepSeek Resumes Allowing AI Access Following Capacity Shortages
Artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek reportedly resumed allowing customers to access its API.
The Chinese company, which rocked the tech world last month with its AI platform, suspended service earlier this month due to server capacity shortages.
DeepSeek will now allow customers to top up credits to be used on its API, Bloomberg reported Tuesday (Feb. 25). Server resources will still be strained during the daytime, however.
The company’s popularity boomed after it released an AI model in January that it said could perform as well as OpenAI’s while being developed for a fraction of the cost. The news sent tech stocks tumbling while raising questions about the need for massive spending on AI projects.
“DeepSeek challenges the narrative that innovation must come at an unsustainable cost,” Gokul Naidu, a consultant for SAP, told PYMNTS last month. “For businesses, this means AI could soon be accessible to small and medium enterprises, not just tech giants with deep pockets.”
Since then, some tech industry figures have questioned DeepSeek’s spending claims. Demis Hassabis, Google’s AI chief, said the company appeared to have reported the cost of its final training round, “which is a fraction of the total cost.”
Meanwhile, Andrew Wells, chief data and AI officer, North America, for NTT Data, told PYMNTS in an interview posted this week that executives face a dilemma regarding generative AI. How do they innovate fast in a way that ensures privacy and avoids regulatory scrutiny?
“It was that dichotomy … that was causing a lot of angst in a lot of the CEOs (and CIOs) that I talked to,” Wells said.
The conversation also touched on DeepSeek in relation to the way generative AI has begun to be commoditized despite being a fairly new technology.
“I look at GenAI as the phase that we’re in now and starting to get commoditized,” Wells said. “I think DeepSeek definitely shot the arrow across our bow to say that we can do this for a lot less and make models that have high efficacy.”
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