DeepSeek per person, from top to bottom

From lawyers, journalists to real estate agents, all walks of life are accelerating to embrace this wave of technology. In just a few months, AI has gone from being "optional" to being a "must-have skill", and companies and practitioners have invested in training to try to increase the "AI rate" in business processes. However, this technological revolution is also accompanied by anxiety and controversy - from the layoff crisis of large companies to small and medium-sized enterprises, to the "leek-cutting" chaos of various training institutions, the popularity of DeepSeek is reshaping the workplace ecology.

The "DeepSeek Storm" sweeping the world is still indiscriminately sweeping all walks of life, and the anxiety index of workers has already exploded.

Just after returning to work after the Spring Festival holiday, Li Yang saw several messages about "AI training" in the law firm group. There was a "Technology Empowers Lawyers to Develop New Practices in Business-DeepSeek Application Special Lecture" hosted by the Chengdu Lawyers Association, and there was also an invitation to a live broadcast of "DeepSeek Legal Professional Practice" initiated by a certain industry website.

Most lawyers and law firms do not have a traditional employment relationship, so law firms often do not force them to participate in training. However, Li Yang did not want to miss it. Considering time, he chose the latter and entered the live broadcast room at 19:00 that night. During the one and a half hour live broadcast, the number of viewers remained at around 130,000. Assuming that all of them are practicing lawyers, they account for 17% of the country (750,000 practicing lawyers in the country in September 2024).

Li Yang was somewhat emotional about this number, "To be honest, if it weren't for the training, I wouldn't have even heard of this website in all my years of working." What he knows is that several law firms have recently been promoting training related to DeepSeek. Li Yang once used DeepSeek to draft a defense opinion.

In the past month, the disruptive innovation brought by DeepSeek has also cast a shadow of "being replaced by AI" over the workers. Every industry is thinking about how to improve the "AI rate" in business processes.

Not only ordinary people feel anxious, but even local managers can't let go of missing out. Not long ago, Jiangsu official media published three special articles in two consecutive days: "Why did DeepSeek appear in Hangzhou?" "Why can't Nanjing develop the "Hangzhou Six Little Dragons"? "Hangzhou has DeepSeek, what does Nanjing have?" A few days ago, Shenzhen Futian District launched AI digital employees developed based on DeepSeek, which sparked heated discussions.

A top-down nationwide AI transformation movement is underway.

1. From tasteless to must-have overnight

During just one Spring Festival, employees of state-owned enterprises in third-tier cities felt that AI had changed from being "optional" to a "must-learn" technology.

In the first week of work, Yueyang received a "DeepSeek Training Notice" from the company. This training was initiated by the group headquarters, and third-party training companies were invited. Branches signed up to participate in turn. The main content included the popularization of basic AI knowledge, analysis of the characteristics of various AI tools, and how DeepSeek + various efficiency tools can assist office work.

Unlike lawyers who can choose to participate in training, overseas companies require everyone to attend.

Yueyang had heard of DeepSeek during the Spring Festival. After trying it, she was a little surprised and shocked. But she didn't expect that she would be instantly engulfed by this wave as soon as she returned to work, and her anxiety was off the charts. Before the Spring Festival, everyone still felt that AI was a bit tasteless.

Chang Jia is also deeply touched by the undercurrents stirred up by AI.

As a reporter for a newspaper in Chengdu, she recently felt that her leader had become like a "class teacher", requiring all employees to learn how to use DeepSeek and also checking their learning outcomes.

Chang Jia was the only person in charge of AI in the newspaper. The poor profitability of local AI companies did not bring her more business cooperation. Before the Spring Festival, the leaders thought about giving up this line, but the situation changed drastically after the New Year.

Chang Jia believes that the change in leadership’s attitude toward AI does not come from AI, but simply because of DeepSeek itself. He even requires “every reporter to publish a groundbreaking article related to DeepSeek every week.” Newspaper editors also began to use DeepSeek to write headlines.

Because she had a certain research foundation in AI, Chang Jia naturally got the learning "exemption". But she had an additional task: teaching everyone how to use AI.

Like a row of dominoes being pushed down, learning DeepSeek became a trend across the country overnight. In many places, the first lesson after starting work was DeepSeek training, such as Puyang, Wuhan, Ningbo, etc. Some were organized by government agencies, and some were sponsored by corporate associations.

AI is invading thousands of industries like a virus, especially in industries where humans are the production resources, such as real estate agents.

Liu Jin, an employee of Lianjia, recently received a verbal notice from his superiors: learn to use DeepSeek. Although there was no formal training, Liu Jin observed that all his colleagues in the store actively embraced DeepSeek. The reason is simple: Lianjia's internal system is not as effective as DeepSeek in searching for listings.

“Most of the requirements raised by customers are very vague. If we use our system, we may not be able to find the hidden information even after searching for a long time. Now, we only need to tell DeepSeek the budget, requirements and other information, and the communities found are often more suitable.”

2. Anxiety Pushers

Ordinary people may not be the first to feel the shock wave. After the release of the DeepSeek V2 open source model, it became the "price killer" of large models, quickly triggering a price war in the large model industry. ByteDance, Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent and other large companies followed suit.

Founder Liang Wenfeng believes that "AI should be accessible to everyone and affordable for everyone."

But just as the source is working to reduce the cost of using AI, a new source of revenue is spreading invisibly.

As the popularity of DeepSeek soars, companies' anxiety has also increased. From senior executives of large companies to small and medium-sized business owners, everyone has begun to think about how to improve the "DeepSeek rate" in their business processes, and even tried to link it to KPIs.

For white-collar workers in first-tier cities who are familiar with various productivity tools, there may be no barrier to using DeepSeek. Even if you have questions, you can get more free learning resources online. The book "DeepSeek from Beginner to Mastery" that went viral on the Internet was produced by Tsinghua University.

However, due to the "FOMO" sentiment that permeated the whole society and the invisibly fueled by some influential business figures, some people began to smell the business opportunities.

Various traffic bloggers appeared on the scene, earning huge traffic by leveraging technological innovation and national sentiment, and popularizing DeepSeek in rural areas.

During this period, various course-selling accounts and training institutions used inflammatory headlines, such as "AI is about to eliminate XXX occupation/industry, you will fall behind if you don't use it" and "XXX used AI and earned XXX million in one month" to attract traffic and sell courses.

The prices of DeepSeek courses on the market range from tens of yuan to thousands of yuan, and some have sold for more than 8,000 yuan per month. However, the content varies. Some institutions replaced the prompts of ChatGPT in the past two years with DeepSeek. After finishing the course, some people even commented that "it is better to ask DeepSeek than to buy this course."

The value of enterprise-level training is not satisfactory. At present, most enterprise training on the market is still based on "DeepSeek + various tools". This kind of content is explained on various video websites, and the training institutions only do an integration. For example, the live broadcast class for lawyers mentioned above is like this. Even the class materials provided by the other party are directly from the PDF of Tsinghua University.

Fortunately, the Lawyer Live Broadcast is free of charge. Lawyers who want to participate only need to forward the poster to their Moments, add a sentence "Forwarded", and then feedback the screenshot to the staff.

However, training is just a pretext, the ultimate goal is to sell goods.

According to Li Yang's recollection, the entire live broadcast had a strong sales flavor. Every once in a while, the anchor would come out to promote the website's annual membership, 3.3 years/2,700 yuan. Assuming that 10% (nearly 13,000 people) of the viewers placed an order that night, that would be a sales volume of tens of millions.

3. DeepSeek triggers AI anxiety

Before DeepSeek came out, many AI tools had already entered the public eye.

Two years ago, the emergence of ChatGPT-3 seemed to pull the world out of science fiction. Since then, there has been a two-year arms race for big models. Kimi, Doubao, Tongyi Qianwen... These big models that were born one after another have competed on the download rankings, but none of them has set off such a huge wave.

A survey report by iMedia Consulting in 2024 mentioned that nearly 60% of users said that they would not directly use the content generated by the AI ​​big model, and would modify it to varying degrees.

For most jobs, manual correction is indispensable, so there is no way to talk about replacement. The Paper reported in its 2024 Public Attitude Survey Report on Artificial Intelligence that only 8.0% of people believe that artificial intelligence has more or only negative effects on them.

Human beings' unique ability to express emotions and reason about complex things was once a "safety barrier" in many people's minds, until the emergence of DeepSeek, which greatly shortened the effectiveness of this barrier.

The reasoning speed and text performance of the DeepSeek R1 model are amazing. In addition, the extreme cost-effectiveness has brought the computing cost to a "floor price", which shocked Silicon Valley. 18 days after its launch, DeepSeek's daily active users reached 15 million. In comparison, it took ChatGPT 244 days to reach 15 million daily active users.

There was no active traffic investment or deliberate publicity. This was the first time that generative AI occupied the C-end at such a speed. In comparison, ByteDance spent 1 billion yuan on traffic investment on the C-end last year to promote Doubao, which was 100 million yuan more than the total estimated investment amount of Kimi. However, in February, the daily active users of Doubao and Kimi fell successively.

While most ordinary people are still applauding this technological innovation, big companies can no longer hold back.

On February 1, the fourth day of the Chinese New Year, before the holiday was over, Huawei Cloud officially launched the DeepSeek-R1/V3 inference service based on Huawei Cloud Ascend cloud service. Then Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and ByteDance connected to DeepSeek to varying degrees.

Among them, Tencent's embrace was the most thorough. In addition to business products such as WeChat, Tencent Docs, and QQ Browser, Tencent's self-developed AI assistant "Tencent Yuanbao" was also officially connected.

The anxiety of big companies is palpable. Take ByteDance for example. Although it only connected to DeepSeek through Volcano Engine, Doubao has not made any move. However, Liang Rubo said at the all-staff meeting on February 13 that the company was "not sensitive enough to major changes in AI technology" and admitted that it lagged behind DeepSeek in the speed of following up the long-chain thinking model.

The attitude of the big companies was like a boulder, smashing into a lake that originally had only a few small splashes. In less than a month, more than 200 companies connected to DeepSeek. The rapid response at the corporate level was like ripples that gradually spread to individuals, and the threshold for using AI quickly collapsed.

"Big models assist in writing papers", "intelligent agents batch write copy", "DeepSeek assists in Chinese medicine prescriptions", more and more usage methods are developed by individuals. On Xiaohongshu, more and more "AI natives" born after 2010 have appeared to teach everyone how to use AI.

At the same time, a sense of crisis that has not been fully considered has also spread. Opening social media, practitioners in many industries are expressing their anxiety about being replaced. This includes professions that were once in a "safe zone", such as psychological counselors and traditional Chinese medicine practitioners.

Not long ago, a viral screenshot of a chat record pushed this sense of crisis to a small climax.

In the screenshot, Lv Yixiong, CEO of Shangmei, said in an internal group that AI will be used to replace people in most positions. Among them, 95% of the customer service department will be laid off, leaving only 5%; 80% of the content innovation department will be laid off; 70% of the new product innovation center will be laid off; and 50% of the legal department will be laid off.

Although Lv Yixiong later clarified that "some places just added people and some places reduced people", the screenshots still caused quite a bit of controversy on social media, especially the sentence "one team has to do the work of 20 previous teams", which made netizens lament that both laid-off and non-laid-off employees became "DeepSeek victims."

Shangmei is not the first company to lay off employees due to AI, nor will it be the last. For operators, layoffs are to reduce costs and increase efficiency, while also building a new organizational logic.

This may just be the beginning of the AI ​​era. Everyone should be prepared for the shock wave.