(Yicai) Feb. 24 -- Chinese artificial intelligence pioneer DeepSeek maintained an unexpectedly low profile during its participation in the 2025 Global Developers Conference, hosting only exclusive sessions.

The developer of a powerful ChatGPT-like large language model made no public appearances or announcements during the latest GDC, holding only closed-door sessions with undisclosed schedules and guest lists, Yicai learned from the event organizer yesterday. The second edition of GDC, organized by the Shanghai AI Industry Association and focused on AI and open-source technologies, concluded its three-day run on Feb. 23.

Despite its low-key presence, Hangzhou-based DeepSeek has been intensifying its technical outreach. On Feb. 21, the firm announced plans to make five code repositories open-source starting this week. Moreover, DeepSeek published a technical paper on X last week about natively sparse attention, a method for reducing computational costs. The company is known for its open-source LLM DeepSeek R1, which offers a more affordable alternative to OpenAI's ChatGPT which remains closed-source, limiting external iterations.

An industry expert described NSA as a groundbreaking innovation with limitless potential. DeepSeek's paper on the topic is considered the most significant publication since Google's 2017 "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the transformer model for natural language processing tasks. "It profoundly impacts pre-training methodologies," the expert added.

DeepSeek's mobile application has exceeded 110 million downloads since its launch last month, reaching 97 million weekly active users as of Feb. 9, according to data research firm QuestMobile.

"DeepSeek demonstrates the triumph of open-source communities," Harry Shum, council chairman of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said at the event. Shum noted that open source and closed source are not conflicting business models, adding that open source remains crucial for global collaboration. China has benefited from open-source research and the nation become a key contributor to international open-source ecosystems, he explained.

The greatest opportunity in AI lies in redefining human-AI relationships, Shum said. "Over the past four to five decades, companies that mastered human-machine interaction interfaces became the world's most influential giants," he concluded.

Editor: Emmi Laine