An AI-powered chatbot by the Chinese company DeepSeek has quickly become the most downloaded free app on Apple’s store, following its January release in the US.
The app’s sudden popularity, as well as DeepSeek’s reportedly low costs compared to those of US-based AI companies, have thrown financial markets into a spin.
Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has hailed DeepSeek as “one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs” in AI.
The company says its latest AI models are on par with industry-leading models in the US – like ChatGPT – at a fraction of the cost.
Researchers behind the app have said it only took $6m to build it, much less than the billions spent by AI companies in the US.
DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company founded in Hangzhou, a city in southeastern China.
Liang Wenfeng, a 40-year-old information and electronic engineering graduate, partly funded DeepSeek using money from a hedge fund he also launched. The company used low-end NVIDIA A100 chips banned from export to China and partnered them with cheaper, lower-end chips to save costs.
DeepSeek has quickly become popular for its powerful AI assistant that operates similarly to ChatGPT.
DeepSeek’s free service has topped downloaded apps in the US Apple app store.
Users of DeepSeek say that “it gives writing more personality”, but some features, like response to Politically sensitive question (Tiananmen square).
DeepSeek hits American companies like Nvidia; developers’ breakthrough “undercuts belief that bigger budgets and top-tier chips are only ways to advancing AI”; potentially threatening market need for high-performance chip; Market capitalization.
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