BARCELONA, Spain - The Chinese AI app DeepSeek is intensifying global competition in artificial intelligence (AI), Carles Sierra, head of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA) at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), said here on Thursday.

"Science seeks the good of humanity," Sierra told Xinhua in an interview, emphasizing that DeepSeek's collaborative nature is a "good sign" of how "we must promote scientific and international cooperation."

In January, the Chinese company released its DeepSeek R1 model. Unlike ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude, whose models, data sets, and algorithms remain proprietary, DeepSeek is open source, allowing anyone to download, modify, and build upon it.

"It's great that there's open-source competition because it helps improve these systems and benefits everyone. This is the foundation of open science and open technology," he added.

Sierra also highlighted DeepSeek's success as an example of the progress made by Chinese researchers and scientists in recent years.

He noted that European technology is increasingly lagging behind that of the United States and China but stressed that "progress is being made in Europe".