Notes on DeepSeek: Generative AI is All About the Applications Now

Building with AI might cost 5% of what it did a week ago, so what gets built has never been more important.

I want to try to cut through some of the noise that’s circulating on the rise of DeepSeek R1, the new open source AI model from China. We’re going to see so much writing about the model, its origins, and its creators’ intent over the next few days. But no detail will be more meaningful than how cheap DeepSeek makes running AI models.

Infrastructure spend…