Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of AI startup Perplexity took to LinkedIn to express his views on the much talked-about Chinese startup DeepSeek, which disrupted the industry with its AI model which surpassed leading models in cost-effectiveness and efficiency.
In his LinkedIn post, Srinivas called DeepSeek “a significant advancement for AI and open source” but also cautioned against the possibility of it being used for “censorship and propaganda.”
READ: China disrupts AI market with DeepSeek: A better, cheaper version of ChatGPT? (January 27, 2025)
“DeepSeek is a significant advancement for AI and open-source. But it’s essential to remember that an AI model cannot be a censored propaganda machine for China or, even worse, propagating falsehood. AI models and the products that use these models need to be maximally truth-seeking. The more censored and false the outputs are, the more dangerous it is to use these models, or their outputs (directly as a user) and indirectly (for distillation).” He also quoted Strategy Risks Founder and CEO, Isaac Stone Fish, who said “Communist Party leaders and the military will use the flawed models for decision-making because they must, which isn’t good for the world.”
Srinivas also said that America and its allies need to build AI that prioritizes verifiable reasoning, open knowledge, and transparency. “Doubts on DeepSeek’s costs are growing, but the numbers are clear: LLMs will become a commodity. The future now belongs to the most trustworthy models. It belongs to using the best open-source models with minimal censorship and maximal transparency in the underlying reasoning. We’ve tried to get these things right when bringing up DeepSeek R1 on Perplexity,” he stated, and advised people to use Perplexity instead of DeepSeek.
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Perplexity AI–a conversational search engine that uses large language models (LLMs) to answer queries using sources from the web and cites links within the text response– previously came in the news for its launching of Sonar API, which allowed developers and enterprises to build its generative AI tools using their own applications. It had also been in the talks for a merger with TikTok.