Amid growing concerns about the low growth of the Korean economy, the rise of Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek has emerged as a new threat. DeepSeek is shaking up the semiconductor market by claiming to have successfully implemented high-performance AI models with low-spec chips. This raises concerns that it could pose a potential threat to the Korean economy, which has relied on the semiconductor industry as a key export driver. As DeepSeek's AI service gains explosive popularity in the domestic app market, there is growing concern about AI industry competitiveness and security.
According to the IT industry on the 4th, the development cost of the inference AI model 'R1' recently announced by DeepSeek was $5,576,000 (approximately 8 billion won), which is about 10% of the development cost of OpenAI GPT4, and it is known that approximately 2,000 Chinese NVIDIA AI accelerators 'H800' were used. This model surprised the industry by implementing ChatGPT-level performance with less cost and resources than AI models developed by American big tech companies.
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Jaesik Choi, a professor at KAIST’s AI Graduate School, said, “If the app is used in Korea, there is a high possibility that sensitive data will be leaked to China,” and “it is uncertain whether DeepSec will clearly state its data processing principles and utilization methods.”