DeepSeek says its newest AI model, Janus-Pro, can outperform OpenAI's DALL-E

After U.S.-based AI companies took a tumble on the stock market, DeepSeek dropped another new AI model.
DeepSeek logo
After taking on ChatGPT, DeepSeek is now going after DALL-E with its own new AI image generation model. Credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images

DeepSeek appears to be twisting the knife.

U.S.-based AI stocks took a tumble on Monday following the release of the China-based DeepSeek AI chatbot. The new product from the Chinese tech startup offers a more affordable large language model (LLM), presenting a competitive alternative to OpenAI's options like ChatGPT.

But DeepSeek wasn’t finished. By Monday afternoon, the company unveiled its latest innovation: Janus-Pro-7B, a cutting-edge AI image generation model.


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DeepSeek claims its Janus-Pro-7B outperforms existing models such as OpenAI's DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. In a bold move that mirrors its approach with DeepSeek-R1, the company has made Janus-Pro-7B free and open source.

Like DALL-E, a user can input text describing a photo or artwork, and DeepSeek's Janus-Pro will provide the user with an AI-generated image. DeepSeek says that Janus-Pro can both analyze and generate images.

"Janus-Pro is a novel autoregressive framework that unifies multimodal understanding and generation," the company said in a technical report of the model. "It addresses the limitations of previous approaches by decoupling visual encoding into separate pathways while still utilizing a single, unified transformer architecture for processing."

DeepSeek provided AI-generated image examples of the improvements between its prior Janus model, which can be viewed below.

Janus-Pro-7B images
Credit: DeepSeek

Though fairly new to the space, DeepSeek is already positioning itself as a formidable disruptor in the AI race, no doubt leaving industry leaders scrambling to adapt.

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