First, we had pretty much every AI company in the world arguing for the necessity of investing billions of dollars to train their models. Then we had the Chinese hedge fund-created DeepSeek R1 claim that you can create a state-of-the-art model for a mere six million USD. And now we have a hotly discussed paper showing that you can create near-state-of-the-art performance for a mere $6 (yes, that’s six dollars) in training costs (and using an open-source foundational model as its base).
A new paper released on Friday is making waves in the AI community, not because of the model it describes, but because it shows how close we are to some very large breakthroughs in AI. The model is just below state of the art, but it can run on my laptop. More important, it sheds light on how all this stuff works, and it’s not complicated.
The part of the sentence that reads "but because it shows how close we are to some very large breakthroughs in AI” is the important one.
