The article discusses the release of DeepSeek R1, a Chinese open-source AI model, and its significant impact on the global tech market. R1's low development cost and comparable performance to leading US models caused a major sell-off in tech stocks, highlighting the model's cost disruption and the democratisation of AI. The article explores R1's architectural innovations, including Mixture of Experts and Reinforcement Learning, alongside its deployment challenges, such as the need for specialised skills and infrastructure. Ultimately, the piece positions R1 as a transformative technology, ushering in an era of "smarter, leaner, and open" AI, but one requiring significant adaptation from data engineers.

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