DeepSeek is Coming for OpenAI’s Neck - by Franck S. Ndzomga
Two years is a very long time in the world of AI. And during that very long time, the consensus about the true nemesis of OpenAI has shifted several times. First, we all believed Anthropic was the true rival of OpenAI. It is understandable. Anthropic was founded by former members of OpenAI’s technical or leadership teams, reportedly over a disagreement about AI safety. Anthropic was thus the AI safe alternative to OpenAI. Then, with the release of Claude Sonnet-3.5, it became the company with the best coding model.
After Anthropic, Mistral briefly emerged as a strong contender due to its focus on open-source models, which contrasted with the proprietary approach of OpenAI and Anthropic. However, Mistral’s impact diminished as they shifted their strategy to more proprietary models, likely for financial reasons. Anthropic came back on top as the main OpenAI’s alternative soon after, with the release of Claude Sonnet-3.5 and artifacts. It also captured significant mindshare by pushing innovative concepts like computer useand the model control protocol. At the same time, OpenAI kept its lead with the release of powerful reasoning models like o1.
DeepSeek has rapidly risen to the forefront of AI with the launch of DeepSeek-V3, an open-source model that outperforms GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. This achievement is even more remarkable considering it was developed at a fraction of the cost (reportedly less than $6 million).
