A week in Generative AI: DeepSeek, o3-mini & International AI Safety Report

News for the week ending 2nd February 2025

Feb 02, 2025

There are three big pieces of news that I want to draw your attention to in this week’s newsletter. The first is the continued headlines, hype, and hand-wringing around DeepSeek that has had an incredibly disruptive effect on the US AI companies this week. The second is OpenAI’s release of o3-mini, partly in response to the release of DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model. And lastly, and probably most importantly, is the release of the International AI Safety report that was commissioned at the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park back in November 2023.

In Ethics News, Trump has signed an executive order calling for AI development ‘free from ideological bias’, a report claims that consumer spend on GenAI apps has surpassed $1bn, and there’s an update from the US courts on the copyright issues relating to generative content.

In Long Reads there’s an updated version of Ethan Mollick’s fantastic opinionated guide to using AI and Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, gave a TED Talk.

DeepSeek app displayed on a mobile screen.

DeepSeek has a deep impact on the US AI industry

There has been a lot of continued headlines, hype, and hand-wringing about DeepSeek’s V3 and R1 models this week with a huge amount of turmoil seen amongst the US AI companies. This has gone as far as effecting the stock market with NVIDIA losing $589bn in value on Monday alone, the biggest market loss in history.

Despite all of this, I stand by my initial analysis in last week’s newsletter - what DeepSeek have done is very impressive and shows three things:

You don’t need access to cutting-edge AI hardware to build cutting-edge AI models
There is ‘no moat’ in AI
The most capable AI models don’t need to be expensive

I followed this up with a post on LinkedIn in reaction to Sam Altman stating that OpenAI would ‘pull up some releases’ in response to DeepSeek. To summarise, I think what’s needed is more R&D to figure out how DeepSeek is able to deliver such a powerful model so cheaply, not to rush out new releases which could accelerate the risky race to the top.

In some ways, the turmoil seen around DeepSeek this week is predictable. There’s so much money at play, and seemingly so much at stake around AI right now, that surprise advancements and releases, especially from China, are going to have a really big impact. I think this is a compelling argument for more frequent, incremental releases being made as opposed to big in-frequent model updates and more research being done in the open and shared with the open-source community.

If you’re interested in learning more about DeepSeek I’ve collated some good articles below that I’ve come across this week and cover most of the major topics:

OpenAI launches o3-mini

Hot off the heals of launching Operator last week, and as promised by Sam Altman in response to the impact DeepSeek has had, OpenAI launched their o3-mini model on Friday.

As a reminder, o3 was the last of OpenAI’s 12 days of announcements in December last year. I wrote about it here and it’s an incredibly impressive model, showing significant improvements on some very tough benchmarks.

o3-mini is the first version of o3 to be publicly released and is even available to free-tier ChatGPT users, marking the first time a reasoning model has been made available for free. o3 specialises in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths) reasoning, doesn’t have vision capabilities, but does have search capabilities so that it can find up-to-date answers with links to relevant web sources.

In a clear sign of trying to compete with DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model, OpenAI have been very aggressive with the price of o3-mini in their API. o3-mini is 63% cheaper than o1-mini but still can’t get close to R1’s prices. o3-mini is $1.10 per million input tokens, whereas R1 costs $0.14, which is 87% cheaper. I think this outlines just how impressive what DeepSeek has achieved is!

It was also reported this week that OpenAI is taking on another $25bn of investment from Softbank, valuing the company at over $300bn, despite some of the stock market jitters around AI stocks in the US this week.

Source

Yoshua Bengio writing on a transparent whiteboard

The International AI Safety Report published

It’s fantastic to see the International AI Safety Report published. It was chaired by Yoshua Bengio (one of the three ‘godfathers of AI’) and was commissioned following the International AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park back in November 2023.

At the summit, 30 nations agreed to build a shared scientific and evidence-based understanding of frontier AI risks, which this report aims to fulfil. An interim report was published in May 2024, and this is the now the final 300 page report, which you can access in full here. The report is the culmination of work by 96 AI experts across the public and private sector as well as civil society and aims to:

Provide scientific information that will support informed policymaking
Facilitate constructive and evidence-based discussion about the uncertainty of general-purpose AI and its outcomes
Contribute to an internationally shared scientific understanding of advanced AI safety

The Guardian has a great summary of the findings of the report, which covers 6 areas:

Jobs - the impact on jobs will “likely be profound“
The Environment - AI is a “moderate but rapidly growing contributor” to the impact humanity is having on the environment
Loss of Control - opinions greatly vary on the risk of advanced AI systems evading human control
Bioweapons - new models can create guides for creating bioweapons but there is uncertainty over whether they can be followed by novices
Cybersecurity - AI is not currently able to carry out autonomous cybersecurity attacks
Deepfakes - There are “fundamental challenges” to tackling deepfake content, such as the ability to remove digital watermarks

Unfortunately the report doesn’t go as far as making any specific policy recommendations, but is meant as a source of the current state of affairs in AI safety to help inform policy makers.

However, I think it’s clear from the report that what’s needed is an international oversight body to foster best practices and compliance in AI development that can impose safety standards and regulatory frameworks, facilitate independent testing of advanced models, and continue the multidisciplinary collaboration we’ve seen in writing this report. Hopefully that’s something we’ll start to see take shape in 2025.

Source

AI Ethics News

Long Reads

One Useful Thing: Which AI to Use Now: An Updated Opinionated Guide
Aravind Srinivas: How AI Will Answer Questions We Haven’t Thoughts To Ask

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“
William Gibson