As the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek has emerged as a symbol of China's technological rise overcoming U.S. sanctions, Chinese manufacturers, including the world's top PC company Lenovo, have begun to adopt DeepSeek's AI models in their products.
According to industry sources on the 11th, Lenovo has been integrating DeepSeek's AI model into its AI PCs since early this month. By incorporating DeepSeek into Lenovo's AI assistant "XiaoTen," users can utilize DeepSeek's AI services directly on their PCs without an internet connection. On the 7th, Lenovo noted on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, "We first linked the personal AI assistant XiaoTen with DeepSeek for families using Lenovo AI PCs," and provided a tip stating, "When asking DeepSeek a question, presenting specific requirements and setting conditions can lead to more effective responses."
Lenovo is reportedly planning to strengthen its collaboration with DeepSeek. With global PC demand unlikely to rebound soon, the company deemed the adoption of DeepSeek essential to target the massive domestic market. Lenovo relies on the Chinese market for more than half of its revenue. Particularly since the second half of last year, with the Chinese government's subsidy policy for electronics purchases boosting domestic demand, Lenovo sees it as important to sustain this growth by leveraging AI PCs. Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo's chairman, stated at Lenovo Tech Day in October last year, "The company's strategy is to combine customized AI services with hardware to respond swiftly to customer needs and provide tailored solutions." Following this strategy, Lenovo is expected to expand the integration of DeepSeek's AI assistant across various products, including PCs, tablets, and smartphones.
DeepSeek is rapidly spreading in AI products for corporations as well. On the 5th, Lenovo launched an AI training and inference solution based on DeepSeek's large model. This AI server combines Lenovo servers and workstations with products from a Chinese graphics processing unit (GPU) manufacturer, designed to help corporations reduce maintenance expenses when operating their AI models. Gu Shiguang, Lenovo's senior director, explained, "In actual programming development environments, the code generation feature based on DeepSeek accounted for more than 35% of the overall coding process." Following the officialization of Lenovo's collaboration with DeepSeek, Lenovo's stock price surged over 20% in the past week.
Industry experts report that the low development expenses and open-source approach of DeepSeek will significantly increase its utilization in various AI applications, such as AI PCs. DeepSeek's recently unveiled AI inference model, "DeepSeek R1," is said to offer similar performance at a lower cost than the inference AI model "O1" developed by OpenAI, which was released in September of last year. The DeepSeek R1 costs $2.19 per million output tokens, about 96% cheaper than OpenAI's O1 model, which costs $60 per million output tokens.
Due to the cost-saving effects and the Chinese government's focus on achieving self-reliance in AI technology, Chinese manufacturers are accelerating the adoption of DeepSeek. Geely Holding Group, the world's third-largest electric vehicle company, is reported to be integrating DeepSeek R1 into its own AI models. The aim is to build an integrated AI system that can understand and predict driver needs more accurately. Additionally, most major Chinese automakers are applying DeepSeek to their infotainment systems. UBTECH, China's largest humanoid robot manufacturer, is also using DeepSeek's models to enable robots to understand human commands in complex environments and conduct tests performed in factories.