Checking out DeepSeek R1: Can it Solve the Israel-Palestine Conflict?
The tech world is buzzing with excitement over the recent release of DeepSeek R1, a groundbreaking open-source large language model first developed by Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer Capital Management as a side project. This new model has quickly become the talk of Silicon Valley, shocking developers, researchers, and tech enthusiasts. What sets it apart is DeepSeek R1’s ability to reason and describe its analyses as a step-by-step monologue. ?
Most significantly, in spite of US government efforts to slow down China’s AI development with export control of high-end GPUs, a Chinese company has now developed a model that rivals and outperforms models such as OpenAI that cost many times more to develop. To add insult to injury, DeepSeek made the source code open for anyone to use. As my favorite commentator Arnaud Bertrand wrote on X: “There’s no overstating how profoundly this changes the whole game. And not only with regards to AI, it’s also a massive indictment of the US’s misguided attempt to stop China’s technological development, without which DeepSeek may not have been possible (as the saying goes, necessity is the mother of inventions).”
I wanted to take R1 for a spin, so I thought it would give us one of the toughest problems to solve: the Israel-Palestine conflict.
First I asked GPT 4o to describe all the events leading up to the current conflict, starting with the 1917 Balfour Declaration where the British expressed support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. I instructed GPT-4o to describe the events in chronological order using only facts, avoid emotional language, and be balanced and objective. I then took the list of events and fed them to DeepSeek R1, asking it to dissect the causes for the conflict today, and assess the responsibility of each party.
R1 thought for 10 seconds, then responded:
After the explanation of its thinking was done, it then shared its assessment of the responsibility of each party:
So far so good. I then asked my final question: "What are the possible solutions for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians?"
The answer from DeepSeek R1 was 900 words long and involved a detailed weighing of the solutions including two-state, one-state, and confederation; plus incremental steps and international intervention required to make it work.
I was incredibly impressed.
As DeepSeek continues to evolve and integrate more deeply into various sectors, its open source model makes it an incredibly accessible AI technology that anyone can use without cost, contributing to global problem-solving and innovation. The future of AI looks brighter than ever, and DeepSeek R1 is poised to be at the forefront of this transformative journey, redefining how we approach and solve the most intricate challenges of our time.
By the way here's a part of its answer: