I.T. News – Jan 29, 2025

1 - Meta Engineers See Vindication in DeepSeek’s Apparent Breakthrough

By Cade Metz and Mike Isaac. New York Times. Jan. 29, 2025.

The Silicon Valley giant was criticized for giving away its core A.I. technology two years ago for anyone to use. Now that bet is having an impact.

When a small Chinese company called DeepSeek revealed that it had created an A.I. system that could match leading A.I. products made in the United States, the news was greeted in many circles as a warning that China was closing the gap in the global race to build artificial intelligence.

DeepSeek also said it built its new A.I. technology more cost effectively and with fewer hard-to-get computers chips than its American competitors, shocking an industry that had come to believe that bigger and better A.I. would cost billions and billions of dollars.

But A.I. experts inside the tech giant Meta saw DeepSeek’s breakthrough as something more than the arrival of a nimble, new competitor from the other side of the world: It was vindication that an unconventional decision Meta made nearly two years ago was the right call.

In 2023, Meta, in a widely criticized move, gave away its cutting-edge A.I. technology after spending millions to build it. DeepSeek used parts of that technology as well as other A.I. tools freely available on the internet through a software development method called open source.

Meta executives believe DeepSeek’s breakthrough shows that upstarts now have a chance to innovate and compete with the tech giants that have mostly had the A.I. playing field to themselves because A.I. costs so much to build. It was something Meta executives hoped would happen when they gave away their own technology.

“Our open source strategy was validated,” said Ragavan Srinivasan, a Meta vice president, in an interview on Tuesday. “The more people who have access to the technology needed to move things forward faster, the better.”

Meta is also taking a close look at the work done at DeepSeek. Following Meta’s lead, the Chinese company released its technology to the open source tech community as well. Meta has created several “war rooms” where employees are reverse engineering DeepSeek’s technology, according to two people familiar with the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The Meta employees are looking for ways to lower the cost of training its software — a term used to describe the way A.I. technologies learn from data — and apply it to Meta’s own A.I. The Information earlier reported on the war rooms.

Before Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, gave away its A.I. tech, the company had been focused on projects like virtual reality. It was caught flat-footed when OpenAI introduced the chatbot ChatGPT in late 2022. Other tech giants like Microsoft, OpenAI’s close partner, and Google were also well ahead in their A.I. efforts.

By freely sharing the code that drove its A.I. technology, called Llama, Meta hoped to accelerate the development of its technology and attract others to build on top of it. Meta engineers believed that A.I. experts working collaboratively could make more progress than teams of experts siloed inside companies, as they were at OpenAI and the other tech giants.

Meta could afford to do this. It made money by selling online ads, not A.I. software. By accelerating the development of the A.I. it offered to consumers for free, it could bring more attention to online services like Facebook and Instagram — and sell more ads.

“They were the only major U.S. company to take this approach. And it was easier for them to do this — more defensible,” said Chris V. Nicholson, an investor with the venture capital firm Page One Ventures, who focuses on A.I. technologies. Meta can offer A.I. below the cost to build it — or even give it away — to attract customers and increase sales of other services, he added.

Many in Silicon Valley said Meta’s move set a dangerous precedent because the chatbots could help spread disinformation

Episode 3962 - Jan 30 - Tiếng Anh - Công nghệ Thông tin – Ngày 29 tháng 1, 2025 - Vina Technology at AI time

Vina Technology at AI time - Công nghệ Việt Nam thời AI

Episode 3962 - Jan 30 - Tiếng Anh - Công nghệ Thông tin – Ngày 29 tháng 1, 2025 - Vina Technology at AI time