US technology firms have been racing to adopt the latest artificial intelligence (AI) reasoning model from Chinese start-up DeepSeek despite increasing global scrutiny of the Hangzhou-based company, which claims it can develop industry-leading models at a fraction of the usual cost.
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Top chip designer Nvidia has made DeepSeek’s R1 model available to users of its NIM microservice since Thursday, saying the model provides “state-of-the-art reasoning capabilities”, “high inference efficiency”, as well as “leading accuracy” for tasks requiring logical inference, reasoning, mathematics, coding and language understanding.
The move comes after DeepSeek’s rapid rise sparked concerns that major US tech firms have been overspending on advanced graphics processing units from Nvidia, causing its shares to plunge sharply.
DeepSeek’s open-source reasoning model, R1, released on January 20, has shown capabilities comparable to OpenAI’s closed-source GPT models in certain areas, but at significantly lower training costs.
OpenAI investor Microsoft earlier this week launched support for R1 on its Azure cloud computing platform and GitHub, allowing clients to build AI applications that run locally on Copilot+ personal computers. E-commerce giant Amazon.com has enabled developers to create applications with the “powerful, cost-efficient” R1 through Amazon Web Services.
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