A microwave that writes its own recipes. A smart watch that crafts personalized workout plans. A ticket kiosk that negotiates refunds in natural language. This isn’t science fiction – it’s 2025, & DeepSeek just made it far more affordable.
The Chinese AI company released two breakthroughs: V3, which slashes training costs by 90+%, & R1, which delivers top-tier performance at 1/40th the cost. But the real innovation? They proved that sometimes simpler is better.
AI models are notorious for their creative relationship with truth. Throughout 2024, researchers threw increasingly complex solutions at this problem.
DeepSeek’s R1 showed that the answer was surprisingly straightforward: just ask the AI to show its work. By narrating their reasoning processes, AI models became dramatically more accurate. Even better, these improvements could be distilled into smaller, cheaper models.1
The net : powerful smaller models with nearly all of the capability of their bigger…
