Panic. Confusion. A mad scramble for the exits. Investors who were once giddy over AI valuations are suddenly clutching their pearls, as DeepSeek just torched one of Silicon Valley’s longest-standing delusions: that AI is all about infrastructure and algorithms. It isn’t. AI is commoditising at warp speed, and DeepSeek just planted a massive flag in the ground to prove it.
The AI Arms Race Just Changed—And Not in the Way Silicon Valley Hoped
At Yorkshire AI Labs, we’re not shocked. We’ve been saying it for years: the real fight in AI isn’t about building bigger models, it’s about who owns the best data and understands how to use it. The infrastructure game is over. OpenAI, Google, Meta—take your pick. Anyone with a chequebook can plug into their models and call it innovation. The real battle? It’s not in the algorithms—it’s in the data.
DeepSeek just underscored this in a way that should make anyone betting on infrastructure-first AI deeply uncomfortable. Despite US chip restrictions, they reprogrammed NVIDIA’s H800 GPUs, dodging bandwidth constraints like a Formula 1 driver through a chicane. They didn’t whine about the lack of high-end chips. They innovated. And in doing so, they’ve made it painfully clear that raw compute power is not the moat many thought it was.
Then there’s the real kicker: they’ve open-sourced their software. That’s right—their models are out in the wild, available for anyone to tinker with. If high-performance AI can be built without proprietary chips or closed-source models, then the whole AI infrastructure play is looking increasingly fragile. If you’re an investor who bought into the “AI is all about infrastructure” dream, you might want to start checking the refund policy.
The Old Silicon Valley AI Playbook is Dead
For years, the Silicon Valley gospel was simple: whoever builds the best AI model wins. That was always nonsense, but DeepSeek has now made that obvious nonsense.
Algorithms are democratised. Infrastructure is a utility. The real advantage lies in unique datasets and industry expertise. The best AI isn’t the one that can generate the longest block of synthetic text—it’s the one that can solve real-world, high-value problems.
That’s why, at Yorkshire AI Labs, we back companies who actually understand their industries and own the data to do something with it. Take Intelliam AI, for example. They’re not out there hyping up the latest chatbot—they’re using AI to revolutionise decision-making in the FMCG sector, harnessing proprietary datasets and deep industry insights. That’s where the real value lies, not in another tweak to a language model’s token efficiency.
The AI Shakeout is Coming
Investors need to start asking the right questions. If a company’s AI strategy is just “we’re building a better model,” they’re already dead—they just don’t know it yet. Infrastructure-led AI is about to face the mother of all reality checks. The winners? They’re the ones applying AI to real-world, high-value problems.
DeepSeek isn’t just a success story. It’s a wake-up call. The AI race won’t be won by whoever throws the most compute at a problem. It’ll be won by those who own the data and actually know what to do with it.
At Yorkshire AI Labs, we’re not just betting on that future. We’re building it. Because it’s not just where AI is going—it’s the only future that makes sense.
Comentarios