<p>The meteoric rise of Chinese startup DeepSeek has rattled Silicon Valley to its core. The company demonstrated that a lot more can be done at a tiny fraction of the cost. By employing some clever tricks, DeepSeek squeezed a groundbreaking amount of performance out of already obsolete Nvidia chips. The news sent a jolt through investors, leading to a massive tech selloff earlier this week, wiping out over $1 trillion market cap. DeepSeek's competent use of "distillation," essentially training an AI on the output of another, has caught the attention of the AI industry, as the Wall Street Journal reports, […]</p>