Alibaba chairman Joe Tsai hails DeepSeek as open-source inspiration for AI developers

Name: Does the arrival of China’s low-cost DeepSeek mean the end of Nvidia’s chip dominance?
Uploaded: 2025-02-13T10:04:27.000Z
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Description: Does the arrival of China’s low-cost DeepSeek mean the end of Nvidia’s chip dominance?

‘Let’s find out what are the actual problems in the world and use AI to solve them’, Tsai says at the World Governments Summit

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Media entrepreneur Jeffrey Katzenberg (left) talks to Alibaba chairman Joe Tsai about artificial intelligence at the World Governments Summit in Dubai on February 13, 2025. Photo: Alibaba

Ann Caoin Shanghai

Published: 6:04pm, 13 Feb 2025Updated: 9:19pm, 13 Feb 2025

DeepSeek’s innovations will inspire more artificial intelligence (AI) developers to focus on open-source solutions, Alibaba Group Holding co-founder and chairman Joe Tsai said during a forum in Dubai on Thursday.

DeepSeek’s innovation in producing cheap-but-high-performing large language models is “quite significant”, the executive said during the World Government Summit. Both Alibaba and DeepSeek are based in Hangzhou, capital of eastern Zhejiang province, which has been emerging as a new tech hub. DeepSeek’s models have implications for localised AI, as they require much fewer resources to run.

“They demonstrated that you can use some engineering innovation to drastically lower the cost of training and inference of large language models,” Tsai said. This could lead companies to realise they do not need to invest “hundreds of billions of dollars into computing infrastructure”, he added.

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Does the arrival of China’s low-cost DeepSeek mean the end of Nvidia’s chip dominance?

Tsai likened the development of AI models to education, noting that the children of wealthy parents tend to have an advantage.

“Maybe only five or six rich parents can afford to have the smartest kids,” he said. “If our only purpose in life is to develop a closed-source AI system that is the smartest PhD student in everything or the Nobel Prize-winning kid, I personally think the value of that endeavour is approaching zero.”

The 61-year-old entrepreneur encouraged companies to leverage open-source technologies and called on developers to build applications that solve real-world problems.

“Let’s find out what are the actual problems in the world and use AI to solve them,” he said. “A lot of people are going to start putting resources into applications.”

Like DeepSeek, Alibaba also develops open-source AI models, which are open to the public for free use and modification. However, its most advanced models are closed-source.