The Engineering Unlocks Behind DeepSeek | YC Decoded

Chinese AI company DeepSeek recently made waves when it announced R1, an open-source reasoning model that it claimed achieved comparable performance to OpenAI’s o1, at a fraction of the cost. But for those following AI developments closely, DeepSeek and R1 didn’t come out of nowhere. In this episode of YC Decoded, General Partner Diana Hu breaks down the key engineering optimizations behind DeepSeek's remarkable new models — and contextualizes them within the broader history of recent AI breakthroughs. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/YCDecoded-apply Work at a startup: https://yc.link/YCDecoded-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 01:45 - DeepSeek 04:40 - How Nvidia helps 07:45 - Secret Sauce 10:35 - Results 12:45 - Outro