Why AI Safety Researchers Are Worried About DeepSeek

The release of DeepSeek R1 stunned Wall Street and Silicon Valley this month, spooking investors and impressing tech leaders. But amid all the talk, many overlooked a critical detail about the way the new Chinese AI model functions--a nuance that has researchers worried about humanity's ability to control sophisticated new artificial intelligence systems. It's all down to an innovation in how DeepSeek R1 was trained--one that led to surprising behaviors in an early version of the model, which researchers described in the technical documentation accompanying its release. During testing, researchers noticed that the model would spontaneously switch between English and Chinese while it was solving problems. When they forced it to stick to one language, thus making it easier for users to follow along, they found that the system's ability to solve the same problems would diminish.