One Year Since the “DeepSeek Moment”

The Seeds of China’s Organic Open Source AI Ecosystem

DeepSeek’s R1 model, released in January 2025, marked a turning point for the open-source AI landscape. R1 quickly became the most liked model on Hugging Face, demonstrating a shift in AI development towards open collaboration and rapid iteration.

Why This Matters

Historically, AI development was hampered by high compute costs and closed models, limiting access and innovation. The “DeepSeek Moment” lowered these barriers, enabling faster progress even with limited resources, and highlighting the potential of open-source approaches, especially in a competitive geopolitical environment where Western alternatives are actively sought.

Key Insights

• R1’s popularity: Became the most liked model on Hugging Face of all time, 2025.
• Strategic Shift: Chinese companies moved from model-to-model competition to system-level capabilities post-R1 release.
• Ecosystem Growth: Open releases from Chinese companies increased dramatically, with Baidu increasing releases by over 100x in 2025.

Working Example

# Example of downloading and using DeepSeek R1 model with Hugging Face Transformers
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

model_name = "deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_name)

prompt = "What is the capital of France?"
inputs = tokenizer(prompt, return_tensors="pt")
outputs = model.generate(**inputs)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0]))

Practical Applications

• Use Case: Baidu integrated DeepSeek-derived models into their search engine to improve reasoning capabilities.
• Pitfall: Over-reliance on a single open-source model without considering long-term maintenance and security implications.

References:

• https://huggingface.co/blog/huggingface/one-year-since-the-deepseek-moment
• Hugging Face Data Provenance Initiative
• Hugging Face Economies of Open Intelligence: Tracing Power & Participation in the Model Ecosystem
• aiWorld’s Open Source AI Year In Review 2025
• InterConnects’s 8 plots that explain the state of open models