The impact of DeepSeek on Indonesia’s AI landscape

The development of (Artificial Intelligence) technology in Indonesia has been growing rapidly in recent times. How can it not? AI has proven to be a prominent helper in solving human problems and supporting the growth of many businesses. This is especially relevant with the emergence of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI software company that offers an open-source large language model (LLM). Its debut sparked discussions worldwide, including in Indonesia.

To explore this scene, East Ventures organized a panel discussion titled “How DeepSeek changes opportunities in Indonesia’s AI landscape”. The event featured prominent tech experts from the East Ventures ecosystem, including Willson Cuaca, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at East Ventures; Andrian Kurniady, CTO in Residence at East Ventures; Hokiman Kurniawan, Co-founder and CEO of Meeting.ai; and Alvin Francis Tamie, CTO of Ruangguru.

DeepSeek was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, a businessman and professional in the field of artificial intelligence. Before establishing DeepSeek, Liang had extensive experience in the technology and finance sectors, including serving as the leader of an algorithmic research team at the renowned hedge fund High-Flyer.

Compared to other AI platforms, DeepSeek employs techniques that have long been known to IT experts. However, several aspects make DeepSeek special.

“The techniques used by DeepSeek are not something new. DeepSeek utilizes reinforcement learning and a mixture of experts, which have been around for ten years. But what makes it special is its performance, which can equal or even surpass OpenAI. Second, it is far more cost-effective and efficient. Third, DeepSeek is open source, meaning this AI can be downloaded and used by anyone for free,” explained Andrian.

With many advantages offered by DeepSeek, this opens up opportunities for more startups to adopt AI technology and significantly reduce development costs. 

“If the cost of technology decreases, we should be able to identify local problems and leverage the affordable technology to solve them. This approach offers far greater opportunities for startups or companies,” said Willson.

DeepSeek’s future potential is immense in Indonesia. It could help address challenges across various startup industries, especially those utilizing AI in their products.

In the edtech sector, Ruangguru utilizes AI to power a chatbot that acts as a buddy for students struggling with their assignments. This AI helps answer various questions based on lessons previously taught by teachers. Ruangguru sees that with DeepSeek, its chatbot can respond to a wider range of contextual questions and retain more learning history from users, all at a much more cost-efficient rate.

“With DeepSeek, we can use more learning context for students. In the past, our artificial intelligence might have only been able to remember 2 to 3 paragraphs of learning context due to high costs. However, with DeepSeek, AI can remember more learning history because it is cheaper. This is very useful because when students interact, AI can provide recommendations for appropriate learning materials and methods,” said Alvin.

Another example is Meeting.ai, an AI-powered tool designed to transcribe, organize, and summarize meetings, whether conducted online, offline, or from recorded session meetings. By leveraging DeepSeek, Meeting.ai is able to demonstrate real-time transcription capabilities with greater accuracy and at a lower cost.

“What is interesting about DeepSeek is that it is not only insanely good but also insanely cheap. According to their paper, the production cost of DeepSeek is around US$5 million. In comparison, companies like Meta require at least US$100 million to develop their artificial intelligence,” explained Hokiman.

In this panel discussion event, Meeting.ai has already utilized DeepSeek’s technology, which has proven to be cost-effective and delivers excellent performance in real-time transcription.

Catch up with future events featuring East Ventures here.