Can DeepSeek be trusted in newsrooms?

It's not just Chinese propaganda — DeepSeek R1 could set off a price war that would force model providers to adopt advertising sooner than later.

Another week, another breakthrough that upends everything we thought we knew about AI. This time it's DeepSeek, an impressive open-source model out of China that can run with the big boys but costs a fraction to use. Those looking for cheaper ways to leverage AI (read: everybody, especially media companies) might be tempted to make it their go-to model, but there are concerns — especially where accuracy is concerned.

We'll talk about those in a minute, but first I want to give a heads-up that I’m visiting Brian Morrissey's Rebooting show later today. I've been a fan of Brian's podcast for a long time — it's a master class on media strategy that never ends — and being a guest was a personal thrill. Brian was also one of the first guests on The Media Copilot podcast, so I was pleased to finally complete the loop. Please check out the pod when it drops.

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How DeepSeek could undermine American media

DeepSeek radically changes price expectations for AI, but its censorship tendencies raise serious concerns. (Credit: Midjourney)

Depending on who you ask, DeepSeek either just killed or revitalized AI as we know it. The Chinese model came out of nowhere last week to quickly earn the status of most buzzworthy large language model (LLM) in the world by performing just as well if not better than commercial models from OpenAI and Anthropic and open-source models like Llama.

This would have been pretty conventional AI news (a slugfest over who's best is pretty routine for a model release) except for one thing: DeepSeek was incredibly cheap to make, and is absurdly cheap to run. I've written before about how small models are desirable for AI applications that you want to scale (say, a chatbot for a major newspaper), but there are usually compromises to the quality of your answers. Not so with DeepSeek: It offers outputs comparable to those from OpenAI's models, including a reasoning model similar to o1, for about a tenth of the cost.

How DeepSeek’s cost compares to other, less performant models (Credit: MindStudio)

The economics of AI were seemingly up-ended overnight. The implications of DeepSeek — that models don't necessarily need ungodly amounts of capital or state-of-the-art chips to be good — shaved more than $1 trillion in market cap from the biggest names in tech. The Stargate project, which aims to spend $500 billion to upgrade infrastructure to support OpenAI's models, now looks a bit silly.

An important aspect of DeepSeek is that it's open-source — anyone can use it and customize it for their own applications. That's a big reason why many AI experts reacted with more excitement than fear. AI applications like Perplexity and others raced to include DeepSeek's models so their users could experience the benefits — and the savings.

Is DeepSeek a propaganda machine?

At least one industry might want to think twice before switching over to DeepSeek, however: the news media.