It isn't the power to run it, it's the power to train it and keep training it. AI apps can obviously run on an iPhone or PC. It's training the LLM, ingesting essentially much of the data the world creates every day. That is what drives the need for AI factories and lots of power. Once you start, you can't stop or the LLM isn't up to speed. If you asked it when was the last U.S. airline crash and what were the details it has to give you a different answer today than it gave you on Monday.
Deepseek is not ingesting nearly as much stuff (much more targeted) and the approach to training it is a "good enough" approach. It's basically speed reading the data, where you look at sentences not words. Could possibly lead to inaccuracies but not many, so the efficiency trade-off is huge.
It's all pretty disruptive and exciting, but understandably a bit scary at the same time. It does remind me of the early days of the WWW. The internet was there, like AI was there, but until Netscape and the browser from Cornell Law School you couldn't do much with it. Usenet was fun for me, but so limited. We're at the stage with AI were Netscape is out, people are starting to build websites with actual pictures but there's no real ecommerce yet. I built a tourists guide to the Bay Area website back then, it was probably the first one. But I couldn't conceive of TripAdvisor. There are people with vision out there who will surprise us with AI.