Additional Coverage:
- Meta is reportedly scrambling ‘war rooms’ of engineers to figure out how DeepSeek’s AI is beating everyone else at a fraction of the price (newsbreak.com)
Local tech giant Meta is reportedly scrambling to understand the rapid advancements of a Chinese AI chatbot. The company has assembled four internal “war rooms” dedicated to analyzing the technology.
The chatbot, known as R1, was developed by DeepSeek, a startup backed by High-Flyer Capital Management. It’s said to perform comparably to established chatbots like ChatGPT, but at a significantly lower cost.
This development has raised concerns within Meta about its own substantial investments in AI. Mathew Oldham, Meta’s AI infrastructure director, has reportedly expressed concern that R1 could even surpass the performance of Meta’s upcoming Llama AI model.
Two of Meta’s war rooms are focusing on how DeepSeek managed to reduce the cost of developing and running R1. Meta hopes to apply these cost-saving strategies to its own Llama project.
The other two teams are investigating the data used to train R1 and exploring how Llama’s models could be restructured based on DeepSeek’s design.
Meta has responded to these reports by stating they routinely evaluate competing models and are enthusiastic about the upcoming release of Llama 4.
This news comes shortly after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a planned $65 billion investment in AI projects for the next year, including a new data center and increased hiring.