AI is the latest technological advancement that nobody wants to miss out on, and over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a wave of game-changing technologies enter the space. The most recent example is DeepSeek, which has caught everyone’s attention as the cheapest, least hardware-demanding, open-source AI model on the market. We have also seen a number of reactions, from experts suggesting that DeepSeek could mark “the end of closed-source AI” to tech giants like Google praising it for its “very good” work. So, even for those who don't closely follow tech news, AI has been hard to avoid.

On that note, former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has recently invested in a UK-based AI hardware company, Fractile, and took to LinkedIn to share the announcement. According to Pat, while AI is on the rise everywhere, “the inference of frontier AI models is bottlenecked by hardware.” Instead with Fractile, he aims to achieve his AI aspirations using radically faster, cheaper, and much lower power inference.

DeepSeek is already causing a change in the AI world

Pat Gelsinger’s vision of AI models that don't require 20 supercomputers to train and test isn't unique to Fractile. DeepSeek also made headlines in this area, with GPU benchmarks showing that consumer GPUs can deliver adequate performance when running the model. And that's not the only example, we even saw DeepSeek running on a Raspberry Pi. So, it's no surprise that other AI companies are following in DeepSeek's footsteps, working to develop models with lower computational requirements.

“Being able to run any given model orders of magnitude faster, at a fraction of the cost and maybe most importantly at dramatically lower power envelop provides a performance leap equivalent to years of lead on model development.”

Pat Gelsinger

But that’s not the only change DeepSeek is causing. As Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, recently pointed out, DeepSeek is making AI more accessible due to lower inference costs, but it will actually lead to higher total spending. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing – DeepSeek’s more open approach allows companies to access AI technology for free to expand their AI-driven operations. Fractile is just one of many to come.

That said, while DeepSeek’s low cost is what everyone is talking about right now, it’s hard to ignore that it’s also making it much easier for companies to integrate inference and generative AI into their applications. And with investors like Pat Gelsinger and businesses putting money into these affordable AI models to build more advanced and scalable systems, overall spending could indeed be on the rise.

About the Author

Hassam Nasir

Hassam boasts over seven years of professional experience as a dedicated PC hardware reviewer and writer.