DeepSeek’s Success Proves It: Efficiency is the Future of AI
The global buzz around the Chinese AI company DeepSeek is deafening – and truly exciting. This innovative company seemingly emerged from nowhere to claim the top spot in Apple’s App Store the last week of January 2025, surpassing established players like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Moreover, DeepSeek achieved this feat with a fraction of the time and resources.
For NeuReality, the news was welcome. In less than an hour, our R&D team successfully ported DeepSeek’s R1 distilled models to the NR1® AI Inference platform. This allows customers to effortlessly operate DeepSeek on our AI Inference Appliance along with generative AI, NLP, ASR, computer vision, or any other AI application.
DeepSeek Relevance to NeuReality
It’s crucial to note that DeepSeek’s success didn’t happen overnight. The most recent announcement before the late January market upheaval was DeepSeek R1, a reasoning model akin to OpenAI’s o1. However, several factors that led to the BigTech stock decline — such as DeepSeek’s low AI training costs — stem from the V3 announcement made the previous month. Before that, the breakthroughs that supported V3 were unveiled with the V2 model release a year earlier in January 2024. This illustrates a steady trajectory of innovation and foundational work culminating in DeepSeek’s R1 success.
This success underscores three major points in our AI industry:
- AI is still in its early stages: Despite a decade of rapid innovation, we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible. The accelerating pace of advancements like DeepSeek shows the future of AI is brighter than ever.
- AI remains costly with slow adoption: Compared to the massive investments poured into AI Training, business and government adoption rates lag far behind — particularly for AI Inference which translates these trained models into real-life business ROI. Innovations like DeepSeek, which lower inference costs, are not just valuable but also unavoidable.
- AI sustainability depends on open source: DeepSeek’s success is no coincidence. It’s a testament to the power of open-source models that consistently surpass proprietary alternatives. Just as Llama, Mistral, and Qwen have shown, open innovation continues to lead. With seamless integration and optimized performance, NeuReality too delivers these models to customers lightning-fast. That way, you can focus on your business use and innovations, not the underlying IT/AI infrastructure.
Openness is the Real Story
As Forbes reported last week: “…the real story [of DeepSeek] is about the growing power of open-source AI and how it’s upending the traditional dominance of closed-source models — a line of thought that Yann LeCun, Meta’s Chief AI scientist, also shares.”
LeCun, who advocates for open research and source, drew over 34,000 likes on LinkedIn with this statement: “To people who see the performance of DeepSeek and think: ‘China is surpassing the U.S. in AI.’ You are reading this wrong. The correct reading is: ‘Open-source models are surpassing proprietary ones.’”
NeuReality is also open and agnostic by nature – replacing the servers’ underlying CPU and NIC system architecture to fully liberate any type or number of AI Accelerators to their full capability. Our disruptive technology supports any AI application. The NR1-S® AI Inference Appliance features an open software stack that simplifies the porting, utilization, and management of any AI application ultimately accelerating enterprise adoption.
What About DeepSeek GPUs?
DeepSeek achieved remarkable efficiency by programming a portion of their GPUs to manage cross-chip communications, a task typically handled by CPUs. This approach required them to utilize a low-level instruction set, highlighting their commitment to optimizing performance.
Now imagine if these same GPUs ran with agnostic NeuReality AI system architecture. NR1-S currently demonstrates price/performance gains of 50-90% and 15x higher energy efficiency versus what is typical with inefficient CPU architecture.
Foresight Is 20/20
As NeuReality’s co-founders first predicted, efficiency will drive the next wave of AI progress. We’re already experiencing it with AI models like DeepSeek and LLaMA 3 70B outperforming LLaMA 2 400B — proving that smaller, more efficient models can deliver superior performance.
With the best prices per token and watt, our energy-efficient NR1-S Appliance is gaining widespread praise. Customers appreciate how it offers outstanding Total Cost of Ownership and linear scalability for inference tasks. Plus, its enhanced efficiency and pre-loaded software make it easier for small to medium-sized businesses, enterprises, and governments to adopt and integrate AI. Furthermore, NR1’s architecture enables the rapid integration of applications such as DeepSeek, Mistral, Llama, and Agentic AI.
Interested in learning more about our user-friendly, quick-to-deploy server Appliance that includes any AI application?
Read about our Generative AI and Maximized GPU Utilization here: