If vindicated, DeepSeek’s technology could be to large language models what Nikola Tesla’s breakthroughs with alternating current were to electrification. While it cannot overcome the unavoidable limitations of backward-looking statistical models, it could make their price performance good enough for wider use.
CAMBRIDGE – Thomas Edison, the autodidactic telegraph operator turned entrepreneur, is often considered the greatest inventor of all time, while Nikola Tesla, who worked for an Edison company in Paris before emigrating to the United States, is barely remembered, except through Elon Musk’s electric-vehicle company. Yet it was Tesla’s breakthrough with alternating current (AC), not Edison’s direct current (DC) technology, that made mass electrification affordable. The prohibitive costs of DC would have kept Edison’s urban electrification a plaything of the rich, like many of his other inventions.
CAMBRIDGE – Thomas Edison, the autodidactic telegraph operator turned entrepreneur, is often considered the greatest inventor of all time, while Nikola Tesla, who worked for an Edison company in Paris before emigrating to the United States, is barely remembered, except through Elon Musk’s electric-vehicle company. Yet it was Tesla’s breakthrough with alternating current (AC), not Edison’s direct current (DC) technology, that made mass electrification affordable. The prohibitive costs of DC would have kept Edison’s urban electrification a plaything of the rich, like many of his other inventions.