Microsoft catapults DeepSeek R1 into Azure AI Foundry, GitHub
Distilled version for Copilot+ PCs on the way, too – 太棒了!!
Microsoft has added the open source DeepSeek R1 LLM to Azure AI Foundry and GitHub, showing that even a lumbering tech giant can be nimble when it needs to be.
DeepSeek R1 is only one of more than 1,800 models in the Azure AI Foundry catalog yet the speed at which it was brought on board is of note.
Its inclusion will no doubt ruffle a few feathers among the C-suite at OpenAI.
OpenAI, which is heavily backed by Microsoft, has claimed it has evidence that China's DeepSeek used its model for producing training data. Redmond was said to be looking into those claims, too.
R1 – the Beijing-censored, supposedly efficiently trained LLM that only emerged last week – wreaked havoc on Monday by battering the share price of many US tech corporations as investors started to question Silicon Valley's view that billions and more billions of dollars for GPUs, IT infrastructure, and other costs are needed to train AI.
Microsoft said of the latest addition to its Azure AI Foundry cloudy portfolio: "DeepSeek R1 has undergone rigorous red teaming and safety evaluations, including automated assessments of model behavior and extensive security reviews to mitigate potential risks."
The plan is to also bring Distilled DeepSeek R1 models to Copilot+ PCs, with the first release, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, being made available in the AI toolkit and the 7B and 14B variants following soon. Qualcomm Snapdragon X-powered kit is the first to support the NPU-optimized versions, with Intel Core Ultra 200V coming later.
That said, OpenAI's o1, which like R1 is capable of some reasoning before it answers a query, is also going to be made available "for free" to all users of Copilot under Microsoft's Think Deeper brand that emerged in October.
- DeepSeek's not the only Chinese LLM maker OpenAI and pals have to worry about. Right, Alibaba?
- Guess who left a database wide open, exposing chat logs, API keys, and more? Yup, DeepSeek
- OpenAI cozies up to Uncle Sam with ChatGPT government edition
- US AI shares battered, bruised, and holding after yesterday's DeepSeek beating
The availability of cloud-hosted DeepSeek R1 on Azure AI Foundry made local versions inevitable. Microsoft said: "With the speed and power characteristics of the NPU-optimized version of the DeepSeek R1 models, users will be able to interact with these groundbreaking models entirely locally."
On the swift addition of DeepSeek R1 to Microsoft's platform, the US biz said: "This rapid accessibility – once unimaginable just months ago – is central to our vision for Azure AI Foundry: bringing the best AI models together in one place to accelerate innovation and unlock new possibilities for enterprises worldwide."
Microsoft might have moved rapidly to add R1 to its catalog, but it is unclear whether it has done anything about the censorship of DeepSeek's models.
The Reg asked the DeepSeek chatbot about Tiananmen Square and in a terse reply, it stated: "Sorry, that's beyond my current scope. Let's talk about something else."
The chatbot was, however, more than happy to spill the beans on the US Capitol attack on January 6, 2021. ®