Wall Street and Silicon Valley spoke out Monday about growing fears about DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence startup that claims to have developed advanced models at a fraction of its U.S. counterparts. Attacked by an intelligence startup.
Shares of Nvidia and other major tech giants shed more than $1 trillion in market value as investors parsed the details. Deepseek claims to be able to build an AI model for just $6 million in a few months, undercutting expectations in an industry predicting hundreds of billions of dollars in spending on chips and other infrastructure.
Deepseek quickly rocketed to the top of Apple's App Store charts over the weekend. It beats out Openai's ChatGpt and other competitors. The rapid rise sparked panic that the US could lose its AI advantage over China.
Here's what you need to know about Deepseek:
What is Deepseek?
Deepseek was founded in May 2023. The company, based in Hangzhou, China, develops open source AI models. That is, it is publicly available and developers can use it.
When was the Deepseek model released?
Deepseek released details on R1 earlier this month. R1 is an inference model that supports chatbots. AI companies headed to Silicon Valley with research papers explaining how to build models.
Deepseek says the model is better at problem-solving despite being much cheaper to train and run than its rivals.
Is Deepseek better than ChatGpt?
Deepseek says that the performance of the R1 model is “PAR” in the latest release of Openai.
Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang recently told CNBC that Deepseek is “top performer, or pretty much on par with America's best models.”
Who owns deepseek?
Deepseek's top shareholder is Liang Wenfeng, who runs the $8 billion Chinese hedge fund Highflyer. High-Flyer has an office in the same building as its headquarters, according to Chinese company records obtained by Reuters.
Does Deepseek engage in censorship?
AI chatbots have already faced allegations of rampant censorship, in line with the Chinese Communist Party's preferences.
Deepseek acknowledged that its “programming and knowledge base is designed to comply with Chinese laws and regulations as well as socialist core values.” Output published by the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on China.
The chatbot self-censored China's leader Xi Jinping, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, China's human rights genocide, China's human rights abuses, the abuse of Uyghurs in New Jiang Province, and whether Taiwan is a country. I did.
Is Deepseek public?
Deepseek is a privately held startup and is not publicly available in the United States.
Is Deepseek a threat to Nvidia?
Nvidia stock shot up a whopping 17% in Monday trading on the Deepseek-related panic, erasing more than $600 billion in value from its market cap. However, the long-term threat that Deep Seek's success poses to Nvidia's business model remains to be seen.
For example, Citi analysts said access to advanced computer chips, such as those created by Nvidia, is a key barrier to entering the AI market. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives described the Chaos regarding Deepseek's launch as a “buying opportunity.”
Nvidia is also heavily involved in President Trump's $500 billion “Stargate” AI infrastructure project.
Nvidia Bulls notes that Deepseek has used its chips to train models despite having a less costly footprint than previously thought.
