Alibaba Cloud has recently joined forces with DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, by offering its models on its platform.
This move by Alibaba Cloud mirrors that of other tech giants, who have also made DeepSeek’s open-source systems available to their users.
According to a WeChat post by Alibaba Cloud, users can now utilize the LLM without the need to code, from training to deployment and inference. This setup aims to simplify AI model development, making it quicker and more effective for developers and enterprises.
Users can discover DeepSeek’s AI models in Alibaba Cloud’s PAI Model Gallery, which includes a range of open-source large language models. These models can be used to power various applications, from text generation to complex reasoning tasks. Among the models available are DeepSeek’s flagship models, DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1, which were developed at a fraction of the cost and computing power typically required by major AI firms. The gallery also features smaller versions of these models, such as DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B, which have been optimized for efficiency and size.
LLMs play a crucial role in generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Open-source models provide developers with the flexibility to enhance an AI’s capabilities. Model distillation, a technique used to train smaller models to replicate the performance of larger ones, is also gaining popularity among companies looking to scale AI applications efficiently.
Alibaba Cloud’s decision to incorporate DeepSeek’s models comes shortly after introducing its own Qwen 2.5-Max model, which competes directly with DeepSeek-V3. This trend of major cloud providers integrating DeepSeek’s technology to enrich their offerings is evident, with Huawei Cloud partnering with SiliconFlow to bring DeepSeek’s models to its Ascend platform, Tencent supporting DeepSeek’s R1 model, and Nvidia adding DeepSeek-R1 to its NIM microservice.
Other tech giants, including Microsoft and Amazon, are also following suit, offering support for DeepSeek’s models on their cloud platforms. Despite the growing support for DeepSeek, some experts remain skeptical about the actual cost-saving benefits of these models.
For now, major cloud providers are focused on providing their users with access to these cost-effective AI models, with the long-term impact of DeepSeek’s technology on the AI landscape yet to be fully realized.
(Photo by Unsplash)
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