Deepseek is pretty amazing. I made 22 API calls yesterday and I have spent….$0.005. Granted my use case is extremely simple, just some simple data work, extracting and shuffling data from a csv file to create a directory page on a website. But what would’ve taken me 2x longer copy and pasting, with lots of context switching that would’ve taxed my limited cognitive battery cells, took me only less than 10 minutes. If I had mastered using a coding agent like Hermes or Antigravity, I probably would’ve asked the AI to publish it on my Substack with a few lines. (But I’m a control freak, so probably will never do this unless I’m extremely confident it won’t run away from me and commit some kind of move that would tank my socials. But I digress.)

Besides the data work, I was also having an interview style conversation with Deepseek, using my answers to write a post for a drama discussion. The post was super off in terms of tone, but I was happy to use it as a first draft to polish. Before using Deepseek, I used Mistral’s Le Chat for this and was clocked out after a few rounds with it.

Each time I think about the Deepseek Moment, when the company announcing its open source and extremely cost-effective nature on the Internet, I remember it being one of the happiest times online (for me, the ever present nerd.)

Back then, I was reluctant to pay for ChatGPT and wondered how folks from my region and other poorer Global South countries could ever catch up with US citizens. I was also feeling a tad bitter that again, high tech is gated from us thanks to everything being denominated US dollars.

The Deepseek moment was a very happy moment due to this. Finally we can have access to affordable, equivalent AI tech. So, as the Anglophile world (I really hate the word, but what can we call Westerners?) wring their hands over ethics, morals and diminished human cognition, the global south ignores them because we’re too busy keeping pace and trying to learn as fast as we can. Having US dominate AI for a year or two was a slightly scary experience, especially when prices were starting to creep up. Deepseek was a “now this is our chance, let’s hurry up” moment.

We learned from history, the price of being behind technologically. It’s almost existential for us.

Note: I’ve retired my Le Chat subscription and am now on using the platform’s free plan and using the API pay-per-use on Typing Mind)