DeepSeek is a hot topic on earnings calls this quarter. And it was no different at AT&T's earnings call for the fourth quarter of 2024. AT&T CEO John Stankey was asked about DeepSeek that shocked US stock market earlier this week, wiping out billions from market capital of technology companies led by AI chip giant Nvidia.
AT&T CEO Stankey was asked about the impact of Deepseek and if the company planned to use cloud and AI to both improve relationships with customers, improve product and lowering their overall expenses. To this Stankey replied, "We’ve used it a lot internally in our operations. We’re seeing demonstrative improvements in our code effectiveness. And I shared this on a previous call, we’re spending less right now to develop new code internally and getting more. And it’s through the application of AI and the technology and what we’re able to do with generative AI."
It's because we are early in the race
Commenting further on the impact of DeepSeek, he said,
"Because we’re very early in it, we should expect there’s going to be days we wake up like this one when somebody comes in and says they figured out a way to get as much benefit out of the model by consuming less power or using less processing capability or they fine-tune the models to work in a particular domain area more effectively or they can run locally as opposed to in the cloud, which is going to open up and facilitate new applications and business models.""I would expect for a nascent technology like this that we’re going to have those moments because necessity is the mother of invention. And there’s a lot of money, an awful lot of money and a lot of creative minds working on this. And people are going to come up with better ways to apply it," he added.
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