Skip to main content
Paul Welty, PhD AI, WORK, AND STAYING HUMAN

· artificial-intelligence

Bookmark: Deepseek is bad for silicon valley. But it might be great for you.

Bookmark: Deepseek is bad for silicon valley. But it might be great for you.

Explore how DeepSeek's cost-effective AI model disrupts Silicon Valley, offering powerful tech solutions while raising critical privacy and security concerns.

I couldn’t find a direct quote from the article related to DeepSeek’s AI model. Please provide more specific details or try again with more context.
DeepSeek is bad for Silicon Valley. But it might be great for you.

DeepSeek, a Chinese startup, has disrupted the tech industry by unveiling an open-source AI model, DeepSeek-R1. This model rivals OpenAI’s o1 in performance with significantly lower resource expenditure. While companies like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have spent billions developing AI, DeepSeek reportedly trained its predecessor for under $6 million. Their model’s appeal lies in offering powerful AI capabilities at a fraction of the cost, providing affordable access to businesses and developers. However, it’s not entirely open-source, as the training data and code aren’t fully disclosed.

The debut of DeepSeek-R1 impacted major tech companies, diminishing their stock values, particularly harming NVIDIA. Despite US efforts to curb China’s AI advancements through export restrictions, Chinese companies like DeepSeek are progressing rapidly, demonstrating that this technological race isn’t zero-sum.

DeepSeek’s approach raises questions about privacy and data handling, particularly with its compliance with Chinese censorship laws. Although it challenges the Silicon Valley status quo, concerns remain regarding the implications of a Chinese company offering such models openly, potentially affecting US national security. Nonetheless, DeepSeek illustrates the feasibility of building advanced AI on open-source principles, offering a glimpse into a more democratized AI future.

Why customer tools are organized wrong

This article reveals a fundamental flaw in how customer support tools are designed—organizing by interaction type instead of by customer—and explains why this fragmentation wastes time and obscures the full picture you need to help users effectively.

Infrastructure shapes thought

The tools you build determine what kinds of thinking become possible. On infrastructure, friction, and building deliberately for thought rather than just throughput.

Server-side dashboard architecture: Why moving data fetching off the browser changes everything

How choosing server-side rendering solved security, CORS, and credential management problems I didn't know I had.

The work of being available now

A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.

The practice of work in progress

Practical essays on how work actually gets done.

Manual fluency is the prerequisite for agent supervision

You cannot responsibly automate what you cannot do manually. AI agents speed up work for people who already know how to do it. They do not replace the need to learn the work in the first place.

The gun you didn't need

Every organization has loaded weapons lying around that nobody remembers loading. The most dangerous capability in any system is the one you built 'just in case.'

Nobody promotes you to operator

There's a moment in every project where the work stops being about building and starts being about keeping things running. Nobody announces this transition. Nobody gives you new tools for it. And most people keep building long past the point where they should have stopped.

Bookmark: How AI innovation is driving educational excellence

Explore how AI is revolutionizing education with personalized learning tools, empowering teachers, and addressing academic integrity challenges.

AI didn’t deskill us, we were already deskilled

This article challenges the narrative that AI is deskilling workers, instead highlighting how many jobs were already mechanical. It offers a thought-provoking perspective on how AI could be an opportunity to reclaim and enhance human skills.

Redefining leadership: Embracing human judgment amid AI disruption

This article offers a critical perspective on how AI is reshaping the job market and challenges leaders to focus on uniquely human skills like judgment and responsibility, providing valuable insights for anyone interested in the future of work and leadership.