DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking
DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup, made headlines worldwide after it topped app download charts and caused US tech stocks to sink.
In January, it released its latest model, DeepSeek R1, which it said rivalled technology developed by ChatGPT-maker OpenAI in its capabilities, while costing far less to create.
Its popularity and potential rattled investors, wiping billions of dollars off the market value of chip giant Nvidia – and called into question whether American firms would dominate the booming artificial intelligence (AI) market, as many assumed they would.
President Donald Trump described it as a “wake-up call” for US companies.
What is DeepSeek?
DeepSeek is the name of a free AI-powered chatbot, which looks, feels and works very much like ChatGPT.
That means it’s used for many of the same tasks, though exactly how well it works compared to its rivals is up for debate.
It is reportedly as powerful as OpenAI’s o1 model – released at the end of last year – in tasks including mathematics and coding.
Like o1, R1 is a “reasoning” model. These models produce responses incrementally, simulating how humans reason through problems or ideas.
Deepseek says it has been able to do this cheaply – researchers behind it claim it cost $6m (£4.8m) to train, a fraction of the “over $100m” alluded to by OpenAI boss Sam Altman when discussing GPT-4.
It has also seemingly be able to minimise the impact of US restrictions on the most powerful chips reaching China.
DeepSeek’s founder reportedly built up a store of Nvidia A100 chips, which have been banned from export to China since September 2022. Some experts believe he paired these chips with cheaper, less sophisticated ones – ending up with a much more efficient process.
DeepSeek also uses less memory than its rivals, ultimately reducing the cost to perform tasks for users.
That combination of performance and lower cost helped DeepSeek’s AI assistant become the most-downloaded free app on Apple’s App Store when it was released in the US.
The same day, it was hit with “large-scale malicious attacks”, the company said, causing the company to temporary limit registrations.
Its website also experienced outages.
Like many other Chinese AI models – Baidu’s Ernie or Doubao by ByteDance – DeepSeek is trained to avoid politically sensitive questions.
When the BBC asked the app what happened at Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989, DeepSeek did not give any details about the massacre, a taboo topic in China, which is subject to government censorship.
Chinese artificial intelligence chatbot DeepSeek has been banned from Australian government-issued systems and devices after it as found to pose an “unacceptable level of security risk” .
By,
Jeevitha