Open Source and the New AI breakthrough

by John M Repp

On January 29, 2025, DemocracyNow  told us that a new Chinese startup company, DeepSeek, is out competing the world’s previously leading artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI’s application ChatGPT. This news upset the technology sector of U.S. financial markets when it was announced. Why? Because DeepSeekwas developed at a fraction of the cost of American companies’ costs. The news about DeepSeek came after President Trump announced a $500 billion investment plan to build more AI infrastructure in the United States.

DeepSeek is available to download for free on the Apple application store. I tried it. You can give the application a very short description or outline of what you want it to write about and then it writes an essay for you. I wonder what English teachers are going to do!  

What was DeepSeek’s company’s secret? They used open source methods. The software was developed by an open collaboration with many interested and knowledgeable programmers. No secret code, no copyright restrictions.

This is reminiscent of the early computer programming in the United States, before Bill Gates got a sweetheart deal from IBM for one of the first personal computers and made that software (MS-DOS) proprietary i.e. private property.

Noam Chomsky once called artificial intelligence “sophisticated high-tech plagiarism.” Artificial intelligence programs take in large amounts of language from Internet sites and identify patterns which they can replicate when prompted by a question/outline. There are also programs that work with images and music. Many people are fascinated with the power of these programs. The programs also take a lot of electrical power to run.