Another day here on JacoBLOG – and another post centered around AI. And for good reason – it IS the straw that is stirring all drinks. It’s not just tech news – AI has gone political and financial just in this week alone.
This isn’t just a dynamic technology – it is moving, shaking, morphing, and disrupting at speeds and scale we’ve never seen before. The moment you think you’re on the path to figuring things out, some new form of this tech magic comes to market – and not gradually.
That’s been the case since we returned home from CES just a few weeks (it seems like months) ago. The launch of DeepSeek, a new and very different AI platform trigger incumbent Nvidia
stock to take a 17% nosedive Monday – a one-day loss of $600 billion dollars. While many investors bought Nvidia “on the dip,” the financial disruptiveness of DeepSeek was epic.
That was the moment I turned to our AI maven, the one and only Chris Brunt to do some “AIsplainin'” for me (and you). What’s going on here? What do we need to understand about what just happened? And will these events occur again as different players parlay their billions into AI technology.
Today’s guest post will provide some perspective as we catch our collective breath at the end of another turbulent week. – FJ
Disrupting the Disruptors
By Chris Brunt
Many of us in radio have been in this situation: the radio stations in your cluster are doing great — top ratings in their target demos, the sales department is hitting its numbers. Everything is smooth sailing. Then a surprise-to-the-market, well-researched format flip happens across the street.
Suddenly, this newcomer is threatening the heritage station in your cluster, your big dog. No one saw this coming. Just like that, your ratings and revenue are in jeopardy. You’ve been disrupted. So how do you respond?
A similar disruption is unfolding in AI, just on a much larger scale. There have been a dozen major players for the last several years, including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta. Until last week, the market assumed AI companies required billions of dollars, lots of Nvidia, and a giant connection to the nearest power plant. Literally trillions of dollars of company valuations were based on these “givens,” these premises, and these conditions. All this time, the market was assuming that growth and innovation in AI was dependent on ever-increasing investments in coding, hardware, and electricity.
But no.
On January 10 – three weeks ago today – DeepSeek, a little-known two-year-old Chinese startup, released their new AI platform, R1. That model beat ChatGPT and other AI models in the industry’s benchmarking while using 95-97% less resources. By last weekend, DeepSeek was the top download in Apple’s App Store, and the hype led to a big market sell-off earlier this week, with investors trying to figure out what it all meant.
A Chinese AI disrupter was not on Wall Street’s 2025 AI bingo card.
But DeepSeek is not only cheaper to train and operate, the new AI platform’s outputs are really good; its answers are thorough, and it explains its “thought-process” when it works.
For example, when I queried it for podcast downloads stats for “Auadacy” [sic], the output showed DeepSeek’s logic:
- “Auadacy” doesn’t look right. Maybe it’s a typo
- Could they mean Audacity, the audio editing software?
- Maybe they mean podcasts created in Audacity, but Audacity doesn’t track podcast downloads
- Maybe it’s a typo for Audacy, which is a podcast hosting and ad platform. Audacy does have podcast analytics
- In any case, I need to clarify. The user’s query is ambiguous due to the possible typo
Not only is DeepSeek solving the cost/energy problem with AI by revealing its logic, it is reducing users’ questions about the accuracy of AI’s output and anxieties about “hallucinations” – those annoying moments when the technology seems to just make stuff up.
Just like the new radio station across the street, DeepSeek is teaching us a lesson in disruption. Here’s what broadcasters can learn from this moment in time about their own situations, as well as the AI avalanche we’re staring at:
The business cycle is fast and accelerating
Agility has always been radio’s strength, and in today’s tech-driven world, that’s more valuable than ever. Thanks to gig work, scalable cloud computing, and AI, your station can generate fresh ideas and execute quickly without hiring an entire development team or buying racks of servers. Need a new game for your app listeners or a dashboard for your advertisers? It can done in weeks –without needing to hire a team of coders. You don’t have to be a deep-pocketed tycoon to get things done – either in small markets or with micro budgets.
In 1985 the New York Times created a task force charged with anticipating what the newspaper market would look like in the year 2000. We don’t have that luxury anymore. A 15-year horizon is far too long today because tech/AI growth is exponential, not linear. AI DJs, Apple CarPlay, and TikTok did not exist ten years ago. What technologies will exist in 2030 that nobody has imagined yet? We’ll soon find out.
Tomorrow’s competition may not exist today
DeepSeek as a company is under two years old and released their R1 model just this month. It identified AI’s biggest flaws – opaque processes, expensive hardware, and energy drain – and solved them just like classic rock “solved” holes in the rock radio market back in the 80’s. If your competition can appear out of nowhere, how do you future-proof your station? Or your entire company? By staying nimble and ready to pivot. Radio resiliency is one of your best assets.
Make lemonade out of lemons
There is speculation that the U.S. trade barriers that kept Nvidia’s most powerful computer chips out of China forced DeepSeek to be more creative with its resources. They claim to have trained R1 using 2000 chips vs. OpenAI’s 16,000. DeepSeek used its limitations to leapfrog the rest of the industry. When resources are limited, smart innovators find ways to thrive.
Think Apollo 13. What can you create, craft, invent, and innovate with the tools and people you have right in front of you? Ingenuity and resilience are your friends, especially when you’re competing against the big boys.
In many ways we can turn areas where radio can overcome what many perceive to be its “limitations” vs. digital pureplays into positive momentum for advertiser, listener, and community engagement.
Techsurvey 2024 shows that listeners value radio for its personalities and community ties. Note how personalities outrank music, a commodity they can get from umpteen platforms. That’s a powerful differentiator that streaming giants can’t easily replicate. 
Additionally, since 2019, radio’s core listeners listen more for their favorite DJs/hosts than for the music.
(Techsurvey 2025 is in the field right now at many of your radio stations, so we’ll see how this holds up in 2025. Has broadcast radio leveraged its personality advantage or RIFed it away? We’re about to find out.)
Take nothing for granted
Unless you truly are highly attuned to technology shifts, you’re along for the ride. Just like how dominant radio stations could be toppled in a book or two, technology dominance is often a CEO mirage, as we’ve learned just in the past few weeks.
That’s reality whether we’re talking about our job, our industry, or our 401K portfolio. 
Staying agile, openminded, and humble is key, especially that last one. We’ve watch once-great radio companies lose their footing and their superiority out of hubris and arrogance, the same qualities many of the AI celebrities have been displaying over the past couple years.
Know your enemy
And that brings us to the delusion we actually know who we’re competing against. The Chinese have come from nowhere to unleash DeepSeek on the world. Come to think of it, didn’t they do pretty much the same thing to the world of social media with TikTok? Think about how Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat have been rocked by the TikTok tsunami.
Educate yourself
The only way you can think “outside the box” like DeepSeek did is to understand how the box is made and what it does. You learn by committing to your “adult education.” That means finding ways to research your brand even when you don’t have traditional research dollars budgeted (yes, there IS a way to do this). It means showing up at CES on a regular enough basis just like our 30 “radio voyagers” did earlier this month.
Radio has a painful track record of taking a “wait and see” stance toward new technology and innovation. I can’t tell you how shortsighted that stance is, especially right now.
Disruptions—whether in AI or radio—are inevitable, but survival comes down to agility and playing to our strengths. DeepSeek didn’t just enter the AI space; it redefined it by solving the inefficiencies everyone else ignored. The same applies to radio—waiting for disruption to arrive is a losing strategy. Radio is human-first—our personalities, local connections, and ability to engage real communities set us apart. As technology shifts at an exponential pace, the key question isn’t just what’s next, but how will we use it to make radio even stronger?
Let the AI arms race remind us: the next big threat can appear in an instant. But if we stay agile, keep innovating, and focus on our unique connection to listeners, radio won’t just survive—it will thrive.
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Speaking of education, subscribe to Jacobs Media’s AI Edge newsletter. In this week’s edition, we’ll take a deeper dive into DeepSeek and discuss some concerns people have expressed about the platform.
Jacobs Media has consistently walked the walk in the digital space, providing insights and guidance through its well-read national Techsurveys.
In 2008, jacapps was launched - a mobile apps company that has designed and built more than 1,300 apps for both the Apple and Android platforms. In 2013, the DASH Conference was created - a mashup of radio and automotive, designed to foster better understanding of the "connected car" and its impact.
Along with providing the creative and intellectual direction for the company, Fred consults many of Jacobs Media's commercial and public radio clients, in addition to media brands looking to thrive in the rapidly changing tech environment.
Fred was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2018.
- AI: Disrupting The Disruptors - January 31, 2025
- Appreciating What We Have (When Our Lives Aren’t In Jeopardy) - January 30, 2025
- AI: Oh, The Humanity! - January 29, 2025
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