TORONTO — Canada’s artificial intelligence leaders so far seem to have an optimistic take on DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup whose chatbot launch sent tech stocks plunging Monday and threatened to disrupt larger industry players.
Technology firms in the country should see the AI assistant, which is said to perform as well as or even better than OpenAI's ChatGPT and cost 95 per cent less to run, as proof that there is more room to innovate, Canadians involved in the sector said.
“The game is not over,” said Julien Billot.
There's an inclination to think the race is done because many U.S. AI firms had early success and have since invested billions into the technology, said Billot, the CEO of a consortium of private firms, research centres, academics and startups in the AI space called Scale AI.
Last week alone, OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle announced a plan to invest up to US$500 billion in a new company called Stargate, which will aim to develop and expand AI infrastructure in the U.S.
DeepSeek's advances amid this massive U.S. funding show more breakthroughs can happen and they don't necessarily have to come from south of the border, Billot said.
"It's very encouraging because it means money is not everything," Billot said.
"Obviously, money is important, but ... clever people can do something different with less money, and that's something Canada can take inspiration from."
DeepSeek has claimed building the assistant took two months, cost about US$6 million and used some of Nvidia's less-advanced H800 semiconductors rather than the higher computing power needed by other AI models.
"That's a really huge leap forward in how much resources are required to train these kinds of models and still get the top-of-the-line performances," said Sébastien Paquet, vice-president of machine learning at Quebec City-based Coveo, an AI-powered search firm.
He sees DeepSeek as both lowering the barriers to entry but also stoking AI competition because it is open-source -- publicly accessible for anyone to use and build on.
"They've shown that we can actually have models that cost less to build, so we might get more of them in the future," he said.
Billot was hopeful Canada's AI history and assets will create a great opportunity for companies in the country to disrupt the AI world next.
Among the promising Canadian firms he named was Cohere, a Toronto-based firm developing AI for enterprise use.
Asked about DeepSeek on Tuesday, Aidan Gomez, Cohere's co-founder and CEO, said the future of AI is all about efficiency.
"It's not about unlimited resources but about smart, efficient solutions," he said in a statement.
"We've believed this for a long time, but it's finally hitting home across the industry."
Marc Low, director of innovation and emerging technology for consultancy firm KPMG in Canada, appeared to agree.
“This could be good news for Canadian companies as the barriers to entry to utilize the technology drop even further," Low said in a statement.
He predicted DeepSeek will hasten a deflationary trend in generative AI costs and make the technology more affordable and accessible because it costs "mere pennies" to run a query with DeepSeek's AI assistant.
Yet Paquet cautioned businesses against rushing to use DeepSeek, which now sits atop Apple's most popular free apps list in Canada.
"With the privacy policy that I've looked at ... they can do what they want with the data," he said.
On top of collecting information like your name, email, telephone number and date of birth, DeepSeek's privacy policy shows it may also gather your text or audio input, prompts, uploaded files, feedback and chat history.
It also scoops up device and network connection information, including what model of phone or computer you're on, your keystroke patterns, payment information and how you use the company's services.
DeepSeek's privacy policy shows this information can be shared with the company's service providers along with business partners wanting it for advertising or analytics purposes.
"I wouldn't use it with sensitive data at all, but just to ask for a song or something like that, it's OK," Paquet said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 28, 2025.
Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press
