The DeepSeek You've Been Waiting For Has Long Changed
The article discusses the delayed release of DeepSeek V4, a highly anticipated AI model in China, and explores the reasons behind its slowed development. Initially a leader in the global AI race, DeepSeek has fallen behind competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, which release major updates every few months.
A key factor is DeepSeek's shift in focus due to national strategic priorities. In early 2025, the Chinese government encouraged the company to use Huawei’s Ascend processors instead of NVIDIA’s GPUs, aligning with broader efforts to achieve technological self-reliance. DeepSeek attempted to train its models on Huawei’s Ascend 910C chips but faced technical challenges, including instability and communication issues during distributed training. As a result, the company continued using NVIDIA hardware for training while only using Ascend chips for inference.
In 2026, DeepSeek prioritized adapting V4 to Huawei’s new Ascend 950PR and Cambricon chips, aiming for a full migration from NVIDIA’s CUDA to Huawei’s CANN framework. This adaptation process, particularly ensuring precision alignment across hardware, consumed significant time and resources, slowing down model iteration.
The delay also reflects DeepSeek’s evolving role from a purely market-driven entity to a "national mission-oriented" company. This shift has come at a cost: the model now lags behind competitors in areas like code generation and multimodal capabilities, and the company has faced talent drain, with key researchers leaving for better-paying opportunities at larger tech firms.
Despite these challenges, V4’s release is seen as a potential milestone for China’s AI industry, demonstrating that advanced models can run on domestic hardware ecosystems. While it may not be a groundbreaking model in terms of performance, its success could validate China’s broader strategy for AI independence.
marsbit04/15 10:32
