The past couple weeks have been a doozy when it comes to GenAI:

• Jan. 20: DeepSeek, a new Chinese AI start up, released their latest GenAI model which outperformed ChatGPT and did it using non-specialized hardware.
• Jan. 27: As a result of DeepSeek's announcement, Nvidia—Wallstreet's AI darling—lost over $500 billion in market cap, biggest one-day loss in U.S. history.
• Jan. 29: Alibaba, another Chinese company, releases AI model it says surpasses DeepSeek.

That's only a partial list of AI news over the past nine days! I found this old Maxwell ad image which summarizes how I'm feeling keeping up with all that's being released:

ChatGPT is getting replaced by AI

Now to address the lead story: no person or algorithm is safe from being replaced by GenAI, not even ChatGPT.

Diving into the weeds a little bit, one of the reasons that DeepSeek R-1 was able to come together to quickly, was that it was trained by accessing data that OpenAI had gathered. Technically speaking this process is called "distillation", though as this article puts it OpenAI is furious that DeepSeek might have stolen the data that OpenAI stole from us. The result is that DeepSeek was built in 2 months with a budget of $6M, while ChatGPT took 7 years and a budget of untold billions (ChatGPT-5 is supposed to take $1.7B to $2.5B to train).

Even worse (from OpenAI's perspective) is that DeepSeek is open source. This means anyone can download it, and run it on their own computer. And *this* is where Nvidia with it's specialized AI hardware got put on notice. You see, because there has been a ban on American companies shipping out this specialized hardware to China, they did it without it. This guy managed to fire up a copy of DeepSeek and run it on a $6,000 PC. So Nvidia's stock did this:

If all of that was a little difficult to follow, I understand (and we haven't even gotten to the Alibaba part!). Here's a video that spells it out it in fast-clip YouTube format:

DeepSeek is getting replaced by AI

If that wasn't enough, Alibaba just announced (Jan 29) that it's newest model, Qwen 2.5 surpasses DeepSeek. So does that mean DeepSeek is getting replaced by AI nine days after being launched?! It boggles the mind.

The net takeaway is this: there is no moat, and no company or job is ultimately safe from AI, not even AI.

I've said this before, we are at the beginning. Every industry will be transformed, and it remains to be seen who will come out on top. There's no question that our relationship with AI will continue to evolve, but even with the tools we have today, there is plenty to be done. We'd be happy to help.