Deepseek Rocks the AI world - What IT pros need to know

Author

Stetson Blake
January 29, 2025

What’s up IT Pros,

If you haven’t heard by now, a new AI model called Deepseek has rocked Silicon Valley and the tech world.

Earlier this week, stocks like NVDA tumbled 17% on the news of Deepseek as Nvidia was sold-off rapidly.

Last week, a Chinese company called DeepSeek dropped a bombshell and released R1, an open-source AI model that’s outperformed expensive proprietary models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

Their iOS AI chat app hit #1 in the app store and is still the king of the hill.

Here’s the kicker: they allegedly built it for only $5 million.

Why should IT pros care?

  • Deepseek could revolutionize how IT pros handle automation and scripting

  • Deepseek and other models could make AI tools accessible to smaller companies, running on off-the-shelf, relatively “cheap” hardware

  • Employers are going to look for new skills in IT professionals…hint: AI

The really wild part?

Exolabs was able to run Deepseek’s 671 billion parameter model on a cluster of 8 M4 Mac Minis. Full write-up here

The AI wars are just beginning and starting to heat up.

My opinion?

If you’re an IT pro, startup founder or someone utilizing AI, let the big guys duke it out.

The interface and front-end of LLMs are where the true value is made. With models coming out seemingly every week, you can usually drop one in to replace another.

I know a lot of you are probably sick of hearing about AI, but I think it’s worth following at least at a distance.

Speaking of which, I had a chat with N-Able Head Nerds Stefanie Hammond and Joe Ferla earlier this week. 24 minutes in we had an MSP owner ask how to keep up with AI and which certs their team should be checking out to keep up-to-date. Check that out here

For a breakdown on DeepSeek, my favorite video came from FireShip’s YouTube

Anyway, that’s it for today.

What are your thoughts on deepseek?

Hit reply and let me know

✌️

Stetson

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