GuShiio.com Wen| Narrow Broadcast, author| Li Wei
This is the 44th issue of “Narrow Broadcast Weekly”. The business trends we are focusing on in this issue are: The shock wave brought by DeepSeek’s technological breakthroughs is making it the core of an AI ecosystem.
In QuestMobile’s statistics, DeepSeek’s daily active users exceeded 30 million on February 1, only four days have passed since the number of daily active users surpassed Doubao for the first time. It has been less than a month since its release of the open-source model DeepSeek-R1 attracted attention.
In the past week or two, being able to use DeepSeek smoothly has become an important means of attracting new products; as soon as the DeepSeek learning and communication community is established, a large number of users will quickly pour in; news of accessing DeepSeek does not come from operators, cloud manufacturers, mobile phone manufacturers, automobile manufacturers, and vertical companies; OpenAI and Google, which are competitors of DeepSeek, have also accelerated the pace of releasing technical capabilities.
After the ChatGPT boom exploded, and before DeepSeek announced its technological breakthrough, no large model product could attract both B-end and C-end popularity in such a short period of time. To a certain extent, this can be regarded as the second node in the evolution of the AI industry.As the first node, ChatGPT has made the big model a certain direction forward, and DeepSeek, as the second node, has truly kicked off the prelude to building an AI ecosystem.
As Chris Lehane, vice president of global policy at OpenAI, said: “This is a very real game and the stakes couldn’t be higher.Whoever ultimately wins this game will truly shape the future world.。」
As a seed player in the competition, OpenAI has accelerated its pace of consolidating the ecological boundary under the pressure from DeepSeek. Its CEO Sam Altman is like a veteran diplomat, traveling to several countries in Europe and Asia, trying to win over more allies.
DeepSeek’s optimization of technology allows it to build and run AI systems more cheaply and significantly reduces resource consumption, giving small and medium-sized enterprises the confidence to think about how to combine business with AI like large companies.This means that the era of the AI species explosion may be coming.
Not only OpenAI, Google and Microsoft also launched Super Bowl ads for their Gemini Live AI Assistant and Copilot AI respectively. Perplexity is also seizing the Super Bowl opportunity for event marketing. This may be a prelude to AI applications starting to stand in the spotlight, and it also indicates that the competition among big model companies for the C position of the AI ecosystem has begun.
DeepSeek is a guest prop,It is also the core of the ecology
In addition to various diversion methods for C-end users, in the past few days, announcing access to or use DeepSeek has also become a fashionable choice in the B-end market. From hardware to software, from finance to education, all of a sudden,DeepSeek has become the greatest common denominator for different companies and different categories。Hengrui Pharmaceutical even issued a special document requiring employees to fully apply DeepSeek and include it in the annual assessment indicators.
On February 1, Huawei Cloud cooperated with Si-based Mobile to launch DeepSeek-R1/V3 inference service based on Huawei Cloud’s Shengteng Cloud service, claiming to be comparable to the global high-end GPU deployment model. Tencent Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and Baidu Intelligent Cloud have also quickly launched support for the DeepSeek model, and unanimously chose a price war strategy of discounts, exemptions, and giving Tokens.
Office products Feishu and Dingnail, which are closely related to cloud vendors, have also introduced DeepSeek into their own ecosystem. The Feishu Intelligent Partner Creation Platform has fully supported DeepSeek R1 and provides multiple access methods. At the same time, the AI field shortcut of the Feishu multidimensional table can also call DeepSeek R1. Dingling allows users to create AI assistants using DeepSeek’s three models.
Consumer electronics and automotive brands have also announced that they have connected DeepSeek models to their products. Consumer electronics manufacturers include Lenovo, Huawei, Glory, and OPPO, and automobile brands include Geely, Lantu, Jikrypton, Dongfeng Warrior, and Deep Blue Automobile. Among them, most consumer electronics brands choose to let DeepSeek provide support for their AI assistants, while some automobile brands emphasize the integration of self-developed large models and DeepSeek models.
In addition, the three major domestic operators, China Mobile, China Unicom, and Telecom, as well as overseas technology giants such as Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Intel, and AMD, have also quickly completed access to DeepSeek. In the fields of education, finance, literature, security and other segments, we can also see companies such as Netease Youdao, Yunxuetang, Guojin Securities, Reading Group, and Anheng Information embracing DeepSeek.
For connected enterprises, DeepSeek with its own traffic is firstA sign that amplifies the sound volume of a product and attracts customersEven if you can’t do it without me, you must do it with me, so that users who want to try DeepSeek won’t slip out of their hands. Secondly, DeepSeek is a tool that may bring optimization to products or businesses, truly allowing easy-to-use and inexpensive features to generate industry value.
When both C-end and B-end users unanimously regard DeepSeek as a must-have option to use the large model.The essence of this is that DeepSeek has become the core of building an AI ecosystem, and applications and products are expanding based on its model capabilities.。Then, as Zhu Xiaohu said, a very high barrier will be quickly established and there will be the possibility of establishing an open source ecosystem similar to Android.
OpenAI attempts to stabilize ecological boundaries
This will have an impact on the AI industry landscape and threaten the territory of AI giants.
Among them, OpenAI and DeepSeek have formed a competitive relationship that is both born and born. Both rely on their modeling capabilities to gain market and user recognition, and can use them to establish a cooperative relationship with giants and small and medium-sized enterprises. The difference is that OpenAI’s previous lead built by closed source is being loosened by DeepSeek’s use of open source.
Under such pressure,OpenAI is consolidating its ecological boundaries from three areas: technology, commercialization, and international cooperation。Technically, after DeepSeek’s public breakthrough, OpenAI has successively announced technical advances such as o3 and Deep Research. At the same time, it has opened up AI search functions and increased the free share of its products.
Google, which is also feeling the pressure from DeepSeek, has also opened Gemini 2.0 to all users, and has also launched new Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite models and Gemini 2.0 Pro models.
Among them, the text output price of Gemini 2.0 Flash is US$0.4/1 million Tokens, which is half of that of Gemini 1.5 Flash; the Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite model is cheaper, and the text output price reaches US$0.3/1 million Tokens. After the preferential period, the DeepSeek-V3 output price increased from 2 yuan/1 million Tokens to 8 yuan/1 million Tokens.
In terms of commercialization, OpenAI will launch Super Bowl ads for the first time and rebrand it for the first time, using new logos and fonts. Prior to this, former Coinbase CMO Kate Rouch was named OpenAI’s first CMO,Responsible for promoting OpenAI’s full range of products to consumers and business users, and conveys the company’s mission to develop General Artificial Intelligence (AGI).
A more focused action is on Sam Altman’s external visit. He has visited Japan, South Korea, India, Germany, etc. intensively in the past few days, and is working hard to promote new cooperation and attract more partners for OpenAI. Asia Daily believes that Sam Altman’s trip to Asia is a key layout in response to the rise of DeepSeek, aiming to strengthen the South Korea-US-Japan AI technology alliance and consolidate global dominance in the field of artificial intelligence.
We can see that during this series of trips, Sam Altman facilitated deeper cooperation with SoftBank and Kakao. Softbank will not only pay US$3 billion per year to apply AI assistant Cristal within Softbank and in subsidiaries such as Arm and PayPay, but will also jointly establish SB OpenAI Japan with OpenAI to develop customized AI solutions for Japanese companies.
OpenAI’s cooperation with South Korean technology company Kakao also focuses on the application level, including integrating large model capabilities into KakaoTalk, jointly developing Korean AI assistant Kanana to provide support, and deploying ChatGPT Enterprise within Kakao to improve operational efficiency. Shina Chung, chief executive of Kakao, described the cooperation as a “strategic alliance.”
In India, Sam Altman, contrary to his previous attitude of not being optimistic about India’s development of a large basic AI model, praised India’s AI user growth and its potential for AI application innovation. During a meeting with Indian IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, the two sides also discussed plans to create a low-cost AI ecosystem in India. Currently,India is the market with the second largest number of OpenAI users.
Sam Altman’s series of actions are intended to seize the lead in the global market and take advantage of the time lag when DeepSeek is censored by various countries to stabilize his ecological boundaries. The countries he visited were countries that did not have basic large-scale model capabilities but had rich application needs. Bringing these countries into their own ecology as soon as possible will cut off the possibility of using DeepSeek’s open source model to find alternative ways.
The progress of AI applications has accelerated
However, at a time when the AI industry is heading for an explosion in applications, companies with innovative ambitions do not want to become vassals of OpenAI immediately. This is the real reason why the ecological battle can continue. When there are better autonomous options to choose from, they tend to make quick decisions. Figure AI is an example that can prove this view.
In August 2024, the two companies announced that the Figure 02 humanoid robot will use the OpenAI model for natural language communication. But this week, Figure AI announced that it would withdraw from the deal with OpenAI. OpenAI has also restarted its own robot team before and plans to launch AI hardware products.This may mean that both parties are currently more inclined to vertically integrate and conduct robot research and development completely independently.
Brett Adcock, founder of Figure AI, believes that introducing AI into humanoid robots is not the main focus of OpenAI.The right solution is to build an end-to-end model focused on powering specific hardware。He also revealed that he would provide “things that no one has seen on humanoid robots” in the next 30 days, and this time, Figure AI will independently develop AI and hardware.
Sam Altman has explained the reasons for this change in India. The development of distillation technology is making AI models more cost-effective, which can encourage wider use and innovation in the AI industry. DeepSeek catalyzes this process through innovation in algorithms and engineering, allowing companies and teams that did not have the ability to train large models before to conduct model training at low cost.
“Tianfeng Securities” believes that DeepSeek, through technological innovation,Reduce hardware dependence, shorten training time, and significantly reduce investment, development and operating costs, allowing more downstream application companies to have the opportunity to get involved in the large-model business. At the same time, the open source concept also breaks down technical barriers, allowing developers to easily obtain resources, customize development for their own businesses, and help implement large models in various industries.
We don’t know whether Figure AI’s technological breakthrough was influenced by DeepSeek, but the trend of open source lowering the technical threshold has emerged. One example is that in the “Daily Economic News” report, some small and medium-sized banks, under the influence of DeepSeek, have also begun to conduct tests to see if they can develop exclusive financial models.
Figure AI and small and medium-sized banks conduct exclusive model development themselves. The ultimate goal is to better integrate AI with their own business scenarios and achieve innovation in AI applications. As more and more companies participate in this process, the era of the explosion of AI applications is approaching.
