DeepSeek shock shows Europe not out of AI race: experts [Video]

China-based DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence model has shaken the sector by offering high performance apparently at a fraction of the cost of those developed by US giants, with many experts saying the release also hints at opportunity for investment minnow Europe.

DeepSeek’s large language model (LLM) is “making a mockery of the (idea that) we need a trillion dollars to train the next level of AGI”, or artificial general intelligence, said Neil Lawrence, machine learning professor at Britain’s University of Cambridge.

He was referring to the US announcement last week of a pharaonic “Stargate” programme to build $500 billion worth of AI infrastructure, a plan led by ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

Largely destined to be pumped into data centres packed with the latest AI chips, the scale of the sums underscored that almost no European firm can access the resources to compete at the cutting edge.

But DeepSeek’s claim that it succeeded …