Did you miss DeepSeek’s latest AI model update? Despite outperforming and undercutting many top models in price, the recent DeepSeek R1 release barely made a ripple in the tech world, a stark contrast to its earlier, disruptive debut, leading many to wonder: has the AI landscape truly matured, or are we missing key shifts occurring just beneath the surface?
DeepSeek updated its R1 AI model a few days ago. It performs better and it’s still cheaper than most othre top models.
Did you miss it? I missed it. Or I saw the news briefly and then forgot about it. Most of the tech industry and investors greeted the launch with a giant shrug.
This is a pretty stark contrast to early 2025 when DeepSeek’s R1 model freaked everyone out. Tech stocks plunged and the generative AI spending boom was seriously questioned.
This time, DeepSeek’s rollout “came and went without a blip,” Ross Sandler, a top tech analyst at Barclays, wrote in a note to investors.
“The stock market couldn’t care less,” he added. “This tells us that the investment community’s level of understanding on the AI trade has greatly improved in just five short months.”
An unscientific DeepSeek poll
I polled my colleagues on business Insider’s tech team on Friday, just to see if I’d been spending too much time watching elon Musk and Donald Trump argue on social media (rather than doing my real job).
Here are some of their responses:
- One editor said they didn’t notice DeepSeek’s update, but now they feel guilty for not spotting it. (Solid thinking. Only the paranoid survive in journalism).
- Another colleague said they knew about it from their rapid headline scans, but didn’t read too much into it.
- A tech reporter saw a Reddit thread about it, scanned it, and didn’t think about it again.
- Another reporter said they missed it entirely.
- Another editor: “hadn’t noticed tbh!”
So, it barely registered. And these folks are glued to tech news every second of the day.
Why does no one really care now?
deepseek’s latest R1 model is probably the third best in the world right now, so why isn’t it making waves like before?
Barclays research
sandler, the Barclays analyst, noted that DeepSeek’s latest offering is not quite as cheap as it used to be, relatively speaking. It costs just under $1 per million tokens,which was roughly 27 times cheaper than OpenAI’s o1 model earlier this year.
Barclays research
Now, DeepSeek’s R1 is “only” about 17 times cheaper than the top model, according to Barclays research and data from Artificial Analysis’ AI Intelligence Index.
Barclays research
This illustrates a broader and more important point. Something I’ve been telling you about as last year: Most top AI models are roughly similar in performance as they’ve mostly been training on the same data from the internet.
