China's DeepSeek releases long-awaited new AI model

AFP: Chinese startup DeepSeek released a new artificial intelligence model with “drastically reduced” costs on Friday, more than a year after it stunned the world with a low-cost reasoning model that matched the capabilities of US rivals.

The AI race has intensified the rivalry between China and the United States, and the White House on Thursday accused Chinese entities of a massive effort to steal artificial intelligence technology.

Hangzhou-based DeepSeek burst onto the scene in January last year with a generative AI chatbot, powered by its R1 reasoning model, that upended assumptions of US dominance in the strategic sector.

The new version, DeepSeek-V4, “features an ultra-long context of one million words”, the company said in a statement on social media platform WeChat, hailing it as “world-leading… with drastically reduced compute (and) memory costs” in a separate announcement on X.

The model’s context length, which determines how much input a model is able to absorb to help it complete tasks, “(achieves) leadership in both domestic and open-source fields across agent capabilities, world knowledge, and reasoning performance”, the WeChat statement said.

A “preview version” of the open source model is now available, the company said.

Experts say V4’s release marks an “inflection point” in terms of hardware and cost.

“This addresses the long-standing issues of slower performance and higher costs associated with long context lengths, marking a genuine inflection point for the industry,” Zhang Yi, the founder of tech research firm iiMedia, told AFP.

“For end users, this will bring widespread, accessible benefits. For instance, if ultra-long context support becomes a standard feature, long-text processing is expected to move beyond high-end research labs and enter mainstream commercial applications,” he said.

The new V4 is released as two versions, DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash, with the latter being “a more efficient and economical choice” because it has smaller parameters.