An ambitious project to develop an inexpensive version of Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek in Indonesia has gained momentum as the country seeks a leg up in the race to become a tech powerhouse in Southeast Asia.
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President Prabowo Subianto’s senior economic adviser expressed optimism about the delivery of the open-source, large language model (LLM) being built by a group of “smart people”.
“We have set up a team to establish our own DeepSeek. … If we don’t try, how will we know [the outcome]?” Luhut Pandjaitan told the Indonesia Economic Summit in Jakarta on Tuesday.
The former minister said the unnamed chatbot, which would be presented to Prabowo early next month, could respond to prompts in Bahasa Indonesia and English.
“This sort of digital transformation is set to improve Indonesia’s efficiency,” Luhut added, without revealing how much was spent on the app, only saying that it was “not costly”.
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DeepSeek launched its R1 chatbot last month, saying the platform matched the capacity of its American rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT for a fraction of the investment.
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Does the arrival of China’s low-cost DeepSeek mean the end of Nvidia’s chip dominance?
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