DeepSeek, a Chinese company, quickly surpassed ChatGPT from OpenAI in the United States due to its excellent cost-effectiveness, astonishing inference speed, and open-source ecosystem, and successfully topped the free app download ranking on Apple's US App Store. In a report released earlier this month on the World Economic Forum website, it was stated that a significant advantage of DeepSeek lies in its open-source nature. Open source means that anyone can freely modify and use it, and other enterprises and researchers can also conduct secondary development based on it. Open source artificial intelligence (AI) not only helps reduce development costs, but also significantly improves the transparency and interpretability of technology, thereby promoting the vigorous development of AI technology and accelerating its practical application in real-world scenarios. After DeepSeek, the global AI open source wave is surging. The advantages of open source models are highlighted, according to the World Economic Forum website. With the solid support of open source AI, developers can turn valuable resources into professional applications, thereby unleashing AI's ability to solve practical problems. The report quoted tech venture capitalist Mark Anderson as saying that as an open-source AI model, DeepSeek is one of the most stunning breakthroughs he has ever seen, and it is undoubtedly a gift to the world. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun said in its report that the booming development of AI open source is expected to drive down the price of models. Enterprises can conduct secondary development based on DeepSeek and tailor AI solutions according to their own needs, thereby significantly reducing research and development costs. American AI startup Perplexity AI co-founder and CEO Alavind Srinivas believes that DeepSeek is a significant advancement in AI and open source, and they have integrated DeepSeek's R1 inference model into their platform in order to completely revolutionize AI driven search experiences. Srinivas said that this strategic integration will enhance the ability to perform deep searches, provide users with more comprehensive and accurate results, while also adhering to strict data security standards. Experts have pointed out that open-source models may be considered more trustworthy due to the availability of their training data. In fact, some large AI companies have caused public dissatisfaction and even faced lawsuits due to the lack of transparency in their training data sources. For example, last year several artists expressed disappointment with Apple's silence on the transparency of AI model data collection. In addition, the black box problem of AI algorithms has always been a concern. Many complex AI algorithms are like ghosts in the mist, difficult for humans to capture and understand, and their decision-making process and basis are also chaotic and unclear. Open source AI can enable researchers to deeply analyze the internal mechanisms of algorithms and explore effective ways to improve their interpretability by publicly disclosing code and algorithm details. This is of great significance for the application of AI in fields such as healthcare and finance. For example, in the medical field, if AI systems can clearly explain the basis of their diagnostic results, doctors and patients will be more likely to trust and accept AI assisted diagnosis. Open source AI becomes a new trend When interviewed by the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Ali Goldsey, the famous unicorn in the AI field and CEO of Databricks, predicted the development trend after DeepSeek: "All models will eventually be open source." On February 17, xAI company under entrepreneur Elon Mask released the new model Grok 3, and announced that the old model Grok 2 will be open source in a few months. On February 18th, Mira Murati, former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, announced the establishment of the AI startup Thinking Machines Lab. Unlike OpenAI, the new company values "open science". OpenAI had a positive attitude towards open source at the beginning of its establishment, but as its scale grew, the company was accused of reducing the disclosure of technical information and becoming "closed". With the launch of DeepSeek, OpenAI's attitude has also changed. At the end of January this year, when asked about his views on open source, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that although open source is not currently a priority for the company, he personally believes that it is "very necessary to consider a new open source strategy". The article on the World Economic Forum website emphasizes that DeepSeek's significantly cost-effective open-source approach has prompted the AI industry to re-examine the competitiveness of this technology, while also prompting countries to reflect on the true secrets to winning in the AI era. (New Society)