Deepseek still makes AI giants tremble with Janus, his image generation tool

Bis repetita for DeepSeek. Chinese AI, at the heart of all the topics for a few days, has just struck a second blow. This Monday, Deepseek unveiled Janus-Pro, a language model tailored for image generation. If we had to summarize in broad strokes, the principle of Janus is more or less the same as that of DeepSeek, that is to say an open-source multimodal model, but applied to the image.

As reported by our colleagues at Business Insider, who originally reported the information, Janus is not a total surprise for anyone closely interested in the news of the AI ​​market. Indeed, the Chinese start-up has only published the updated versions of its artificial intelligence models officially launched at the end of 2024. After DeepSeek, which has become accessible to all, even if cyberattacks have forced its publisher to limit registrations, it is now Janus' turn to be made official to the general public. According to initial user feedback, Janus' performance is already remarkable to the point of already competing with the references in its category such as DALL-E or Stable Diffusion.

Open-source, accessible like DeepSeek R1

For Janus-Pro, the recipe is therefore essentially the same as on DeepSeek, which should not fail to shake up the small world of AI. Indeed, the choice to base its infrastructure on an open model and even to offer it to the community via the open-source Hugging Face platform goes against the grain of other language models that make their algorithm their best-kept secret.

DeepSeek and Janus-Pro do the opposite and even go so far as to offer their tool under the MIT license, that is to say without any particular restriction for anyone wishing to make commercial use of it.

Just a few hours after the announcement of DeepSeek R1, which particularly shook up established players in the AI ​​market, that of Janus could deal a second blow to the sector. The latter would be shaken up by a very effective tool, more accessible and above all much less expensive to finance. A recipe that has allowed the Chinese AI to become the most downloaded free application on the App Store in recent hours, ahead of a certain ChatGPT.

Source: Business Insider