China Successfully With DeepSee AI, When Can Indonesia Follow?

(leftmost) Co-Founder and Managing Partner East Ventures Wilson Weather (photo: Dinda Buana/VOI)

JAKARTA - DeepSeek chatbots are still a hot topic of conversation around the world. Because, with cheaper development prices, some claim that their AI model can surpass OpenAI and Meta's Llama AI models.

For information, this AI DeepSeeek model from China developed by the DeepSeek startup only costs about US$6 million (Rp97 billion). Much lower than the ChatGPT or Meta AI which spent more than US$100 million (Rp1.62 trillion).

In addition to presenting new opportunities for startups in AI-based Indonesia, the presence of this low-cost DeepSek provides new hope for other startups to be able to present similar technologies.

The question is, can Indonesia be able to present technology equivalent to DeepSek?

East Ventures Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Wilson Weather, said that actually, the Indonesian ecosystem is now ready to develop products such as DeepSek.

"I gave an analogy, in the 90s, at that time the iPhone appeared, Android appeared, Indonesia managed to make (HP) but no one uses Indonesian products, right now? I like that analogy," said Wilson at the How DeepSeek Changes Opportunities in Indonesia s Landscape Panel Discussion, on Wednesday, February 5.

Namun, Ia menambahkan, Tapi dari situ, semua orang mulai membuat aplikasi yang digunakan di smartphone dan akhirnya muncul beberapa aplikasi tersebut. Jadi saya menjalogikannya seperti itu.

From this analogy, Wilson emphasized that currently, although Indonesia is ready to develop a similar AI model, the most likely thing right now is to use existing technology, one of which is DeepSek, to present new products that can solve local problems.

"But for now, the most probable thing is that if the technology costs go down, we should immediately see what problems are in the local area and optimize the cheap technology to solve the existing problems," he added.