DeepSeek Shifts Network Operators' View of AI

by Brian T. Horowitz, Network Computing

The Chinese startup, DeepSeek, could reshuffle how operators plan to use AI in their networks.

DeepSeek made headlines earlier this year when it released an open source large language AI model it claimed is more efficient and easier to train than U.S. platforms from OpenAI and others. In March, the company rolled out DeepSeek-V3, promising improved executability of code and a boost in benchmark performance over an earlier V3 model that came out in December. The new model requires less than $6 million worth of computing power from Nvidia H800 chips, Reuters reported.

DeepSeek could reduce the hardware and costs for training, but what does that mean for network operators?

A Move to the Edge

One change is that organizations could use DeepSeek to fortify their edge computing capabilities. The edge, along with the LAN, is where AI models learn, according to Ed Fox, CTO at MetTel, a global provider of integrated digital communications products for businesses and government agencies.

Usman Javaid, chief products and marketing officer at Orange Business, also sees DeepSeek-R1 models running on an edge node. The models are efficient and can run wherever users want, and he said he foresees a day when mobile phones that incorporate efficient chipsets will be able to run small AI models.

DeepSeek for Research

Today, DeepSeek is mainly used for research purposes. Companies experiment by using machine learning and AI to connect to multiple AI engines and gain a better understanding of different learning models, according to Jim Coyle, U.S. public sector CTO at Lookout, a mobile endpoint and cloud security company.

"Especially when it comes to the U.S. -- because of U.S.- China relations -- I just don't see [DeepSeek] being utilized in an everyday business world aspect beyond research," Coyle said.

Indeed, the U.S. Congress introduced a bipartisan bill to ban DeepSeek. Some U.S. agencies, such as the Department of Defense, NASA and the Department of Commerce already instituted a ban. Meanwhile, states that don't allow DeepSeek include Alabama, Iowa, New York, Oklahoma, Texas and Virginia.

Andrew Athan, technical solutions architect III at World Wide Technology, an IT systems integrator, echoed Coyle's contentions.

"DeepSeek in and of itself will have limited impact, primarily because both the company and its models are not U.S.-based, and therefore have various security and national security concerns attached," he said.

Instead, he said, "resource-constrained" DeepSeek might be better suited for use by universities and other similar institutions.

"DeepSeek's approaches are helpful to many ecosystem participants, including in academia, which has similar resource constraints, and where model sizes used for research are dwarfed by industrial-scale model developers," Athan said.