Scrolling through my phone, I nearly choked on my kueh kapit when I stumbled upon the latest tech drama. DeepSeek’s R1 model had apparently crashed the AI party like an uncle showing up to your wedding with a portable karaoke machine.
Every tech era has its own buzzword bingo—E-commerce! Cloud computing! Blockchain! These magical incantations would appear in corporate PowerPoint slides, instantly transforming mundane business meetings into techno-religious revivals. Industry experts would pontificate, the press would fuel the hype, and everyone—including me—would get swept up in the excitement, convinced these innovations would save humanity from the dark ages.
Today, Artificial Intelligence is the flavor of the moment. And yes, I’m impressed—genuinely impressed. But let’s be real: AI isn’t so much artificial intelligence as it is augmented intelligence. It’s a tool, not a magic wand. I think of AI as a master chef with no sense of taste—phenomenal at recalling recipes, chopping, prepping, and cooking, but utterly incapable of knowing whether the food actually tastes good. For that, we still need humans—flaws and all.
DeepSeek’s R1 model is the unexpected plot twist in an unfolding tech thriller. Quietly built by a small Chinese hedge fund with what amounts to Silicon Valley sofa-cushion money, it’s shockingly good—so good that it’s rated on par with ChatGPT’s o1 model.
It’s free to use, computationally inexpensive to train and operate, and—unlike most models—it actually reveals its thought process before delivering an answer. That alone makes its responses more coherent than modern-day American politics and foreign policy.
But here’s the real kicker—it’s open-source which means anyone can freely use and modify it for their own purpose! It is like Marvel freely allowing you to create a commercial movie using their Spider-Man character to bust a keropok lekor smuggling ring in your makcik’s kampung. That’s the level of disruption we’re talking about.
Tech is never boring. Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, something reshuffles the entire deck. To the endless cycle of innovation—keep surprising me. Just maybe wait until I’ve finished my kueh kapit. Excitement and brittle Nyonya crumbs in your windpipe? Not a good mix.