At Hyperbolic, we're building an open access AI ecosystem where sought after GPU resources and the latest open-source models are available to innovators at a fraction of cost of traditional centralized providers. DeepSeek R1’s release resonated deeply with us as it sparked global headlines about the (alleged) low cost of its training opening the gates for the greater democratization of AI development.
While much of the coverage focused on sensationalized cost comparisons, the real story of resource constraints driving innovation and the need for more accessible AI infrastructure aligns perfectly with what we've been building at Hyperbolic.
On a recent episode of All-In, David Sacks, the US AI and Crypto Czar, and his co-hosts explored what DeepSeek's achievement really means for the AI landscape. Beyond the headlines, their discussion highlighted a crucial insight that too drove the creation of Hyperbolic: innovation often emerges from working within constraints rather than unlimited resources.
The Innovation Behind DeepSeek R1
As David Sacks pointed out on All-In, DeepSeek R1’s release caused quite a stir in the AI world, contributing to significant market movements and sparking intense debate about the future of AI development as a whole. The story gained particular traction due to two key factors:
It came from a Chinese company, adding fuel to the US-China AI race
It took an open-source approach, challenging the closed-source models of market giants like OpenAI
What makes DeepSeek R1 particularly significant is that it's only the second major reasoning model brought to market, after OpenAI's o1. As Sacks explained, reasoning models represent a new generation of AI that can break down complex problems into smaller steps through "Chain of Thought" processing—a significant advancement over traditional language models that simply provide direct answers.
Infrastructure Remains Key
One of the most interesting aspects of the podcast discussion, however, was the back-and-forth about DeepSeek R1's actual computing infrastructure. While early reports focused on a $6 million development cost, the reality is that DeepSeek had access to an estimated 50,000 Hopper GPUs—worth over a billion dollars.
This false-narrative highlights a crucial truth we've built our business around at Hyperbolic: the challenge in AI development isn't just about model architecture—it's about access to compute resources. While massive GPU clusters exist, they remain inaccessible to most innovators due to centralized control and prohibitive costs.
Sacks and his co-hosts ended up making an interesting observation about the value in the AI industry shifting away from model development and toward other parts of the value chain, similar to how electricity became commoditized while enabling broader economic value creation.
At Hyperbolic, we saw this coming, and through our decentralized GPU Marketplace and Inference Service, we're already demonstrating the future of open access AI. By coordinating underutilized GPU resources globally through our Hyper-dOS, we're able to offer compute at up to 75% less than traditional providers. Our network currently processes over a billion tokens daily for more than 100,000 developers, proving that lean, decentralized infrastructure can deliver enterprise-grade performance while dramatically reducing costs.
The DeepSeek Story Goes Hyperbolic
The DeepSeek story, while perhaps overhyped in some aspects, points to an important shift in AI development. As more powerful models become available through open-source releases, key differentiators will increasingly rely on more innovative infrastructure to continue to level up how efficiently and affordably these models can be run at scale.
At Hyperbolic, we’ve been ahead of this curve from day one. Our decentralized network makes high-performance AI infrastructure accessible to everyone, from individual developers to major institutions. We run all open-source models on our Inference Service at BF16 precision—superior to competitors' FP8—ensuring that the democratization of access to AI doesn't come at the cost of quality.
The future of AI isn't about concentrated resources in the hands of a few large players. It's about coordinated the resources at our fingertips that make AI accessible to all.
Ready to join the future of accessible AI? Take your ideas Hyperbolic at app.hyperbolic.xyz and become part of our growing ecosystem of builders and researchers innovating with a sense or urgency to make the future of AI, now.
About Hyperbolic
Hyperbolic is democratizing AI by delivering a complete open ecosystem of AI infrastructure, services, and models. Through coordinating a decentralized network of global GPUs and leveraging proprietary verification technology, developers and researchers have access to reliable, scalable, and affordable compute as well as the latest open-source models.
Founded by award-winning Math and AI researchers from UC Berkeley and the University of Washington, Hyperbolic is committed to creating a future where AI technology is universally accessible, verified, and collectively governed.
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