Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has urged Australians to "be cautious" about the Chinese AI model DeepSeek.
In a press conference, Chalmers said the government thinks artificial intelligence can be "revolutionary" in the economy with the capacity to boost productivity and deliver a "whole range of economic gains", but that there also has to be guardrails too.
"If you look at DeepSeek, and what we’ve seen in the last couple of days, which have been some pretty extraordinary developments that the market has reacted to in a pretty remarkable way, the advice that [minister for industry and science] Ed Husic has provided, which I would echo now, is we would urge Australians to be cautious about this new technology," he said.
"When there’s a big development in our economy, particularly when it relates to technology, of course we have a look at it. Of course we monitor it closely. Of course we try and get our head around and understand the consequences for our own industries and our own economy.
"That’s pretty standard for a diligent government and that’s what we will do in this case."
The AI chatbot, free to use and open-source, is claimed to be cheaper to run while also using less data than its closest competitors, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT or Meta AI.
In the advertising world, the global holding companies are throwing capital at AI, seeking to streamline production and back office functions and give staff a creative edge, but the release of DeepSeek’s latest model puts a big question mark on the viability of current AI plays.
“The key premise is that DeepSeek reportedly trained a highly competitive foundational model using a fraction of the computing resources required for comparable ones, then also inferring at a much lower cost,” said analysts at investment bank UBS.
“DeepSeek, with its v3 model, already contributed to deflation in China AI computing … but now, investors may initially conclude that it could be shifting one of the industry’s paradigm of ever more investment being required to train larger and larger models.”
Towards the end of last year, the Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence called for laws to regulate high-risk uses of AI at the whole-of-economy level.
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