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DeepSeek

DeepSeek AI app aims to reshape global chatbot communications

Quartz

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This story incorporates reporting from tbsnews, The Conversation and MIT Technology Review.

DeepSeek, a newly developed AI app, has gained significant attention for reshaping the AI chatbot industry. Developed by a Chinese technology firm, the app promises to revolutionize global communications by offering innovative…

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U.S. investigates China's DeepSeek for potential use of AI chips

Quartz

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This story incorporates reporting from MediaNama, gadgets360 and NBC New York.

The U.S. government is reportedly investigating Chinese technology firm DeepSeek regarding its potential use of artificial intelligence chips that are restricted under current export control measures. DeepSeek, a company primarily involved…

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DeepSeek rattled Big Tech. Here's what the CEOs of Apple, Meta and Microsoft are saying

Quartz

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Earlier this week, Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek sparked a sell-off of global tech stocks that lost the AI-driven stock rally $1 trillion in value.

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DeepSeek and Stargate ignite new AI arms race with global impact

Quartz

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This story incorporates reporting from The Verge, The Verge on MSN.com and MSN.

DeepSeek and Stargate are emerging players in the artificial intelligence landscape, setting the stage for an intensifying global arms race centered on AI technology. DeepSeek, reportedly focused on leveraging AI for complex data analysis,…

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DeepSeek’s Chatbot Has an Important Message

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 01 › deepseek-ai-investment-tech › 681516

Only rarely does a single company’s new product provoke a major market sell-off. But that’s exactly what happened on Monday, when a large language model from a Chinese company named DeepSeek drove the entire Nasdaq index of tech companies down more than 3 percent and shaved more than 17 percent off the market capitalization of the chipmaker Nvidia—which, until that moment, had been the most valuable company in the world.

The panicked selling of Nvidia had a surface logic. The company provides almost all of the computer chips (called GPUs) that companies such as Alphabet, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta rely on to train their LLMs. (The Atlantic entered into a corporate partnership with OpenAI in 2024.) Consequently, it has been the biggest beneficiary of the huge boom in corporate spending on AI that we’ve seen over the past few years. (Nvidia’s annual revenue has quadrupled since 2022.) Although DeepSeek also used Nvidia chips to train its model, the company said that they were an older type of GPU—U.S. export controls imposed by the Biden administration have prevented Chinese companies from buying cutting-edge chips. DeepSeek’s disclosure raises the possibility that future progress in training LLMs could be made with fewer, simpler chips, and at a lower cost than previously anticipated. That would obviously put a big dent in Nvidia’s profits. So investors dumped its stock.

[Read: The DeepSeek wake-up call]

If investors are very concerned about how DeepSeek might hurt chipmakers, they seem surprisingly unconcerned about how it might affect big AI software companies. Meta’s stock price, for instance, actually rose on Monday, and although the stocks of Alphabet and Microsoft did take a hit, they bounced back over the next couple of days. Some of that is because the underlying business of these companies, independent of AI, remains enormously profitable. But it also suggests that investors aren’t paying enough attention to the way DeepSeek’s success could disrupt the AI market, and in doing so threaten the future profits of the tech companies that are currently spending many billions of dollars every year on their LLMs.

Tech investors have historically profited by spotting the new new thing. But at the moment, they seem implicitly to assume that all of the fundamental change in the LLM business has already happened and that its future will look much like its present, with the companies that currently dominate the space—many of which are not simply competitors but also financial partners—continuing to do so indefinitely. What happened over the past week is a reminder that these assumptions may not be so solid.

The large language model that caused such a stir on Monday, DeepSeek-R1, is clearly comparable with LLMs such as ChatGPT o1-mini and Claude 3.5. Measured by industry benchmarks that rate subject knowledge, reasoning, and accuracy, the DeepSeek model seems to deliver similar performance while costing much less to develop—though just how much less remains a matter of debate. Beyond dispute is that it’s cheaper to use: Consumers can get access to DeepSeek’s core functions for free, and third-party developers are being charged a fraction of the cost of a product such as ChatGPT. DeepSeek also uses open-source technology, meaning that, in theory, you could download the program and run your own AI on your desktop if you had a powerful-enough computer. The fact that the LLM offers reasonable performance—results that, even a year ago, would have seemed startlingly good—at a significantly lower cost means that it has to be taken seriously as a competitor.

From one angle, in fact, DeepSeek looks like what the business-school professor Clayton Christensen, in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, dubbed a “disruptive technology”: a product that’s less powerful than the products at the top of the market but also much cheaper, and that has the possibility of improving in quality over time to the point where it offers a superior combination of price and performance for most customers. In this regard, the rapid uptake of DeepSeek by users around the world has been striking. The LLM still has miles to go in market share to catch ChatGPT, which has more than 300 million weekly users, but since its release on January 20, its mobile-app version has been downloaded more than 3 million times from Google Play and Apple, making it the most popular app on both stores. That suggests that the cost of switching from one AI tool to another is very low, and that the moats big AI companies are building around their business may be much shallower than they’d hoped.

[Read: China’s DeepSeek surprise]

The underlying wager that these companies have made is that the big money they’re investing will result in radically better performance, which in turn will enable them to charge hefty sums to businesses and, to a lesser extent, consumers. (OpenAI, for instance, is reportedly targeting $100 billion in revenue by 2029.) And these companies remain committed to that bet. This week, the CEOs of both Microsoft and Meta said that enormous spending is essential to staying competitive in the market. Dario Amodei, a co-founder and the CEO of Anthropic (in which both Amazon and Google have invested heavily), wrote in a blog post that companies are going to continue to “spend more and more on training powerful AI models, even as … the cost of training a given level of model intelligence declines rapidly,” because “the economic value of training more and more intelligent models is so great.” In the long run, such investment may well result in the kind of performance improvement that a company like DeepSeek (which can’t even get access to the most powerful GPUs)—or the many other low-cost LLM developers that are sure to try to emulate it—cannot keep up with.

When you look at ordinary users’ embrace of DeepSeek, though, you can also see an alternative future. In this one, AI performance improves so much that most customers are happy with cheap, good-enough LLMs, and AI models end up as essentially interchangeable, commoditized products, with the small profits that always follow that type of commercial diffusion. We’re going to find out whether the great authors of the disruptive technology that’s transforming the business world might themselves get disrupted.

DeepSeek sinks stocks, Big Tech earnings, and AI for cancer: AI news roundup

Quartz

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Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek sparked a global tech stock sell-off earlier this week that saw chip leader Nvidia lose almost $600 billion in market value — a record-setting loss for a U.S. company.

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The Dow jumps 250 points on strong tech earnings. Apple is up next

Quartz

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The Dow and other major indices edged higher following earnings reports from tech giants Tesla (TSLA), Meta (META), and Microsoft (MSFT). However, AI stock Nvidia (NVDA) dropped another 2%, continuing its decline after it was hit hard by the launch of DeepSeek’s efficient-yet-thrifty AI model.

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The DeepSeek Wake-Up Call

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 01 › the-deepseek-wake-up-call › 681512

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.

Earlier this week, almost overnight, the American tech industry entered a full-on panic. The latest version of DeepSeek, an AI model from a Chinese start-up of the same name, appeared to equal OpenAI’s most advanced program, o1. On Monday, DeepSeek overtook ChatGPT as the No. 1 free app on Apple’s mobile-app store in the United States.

So far, China has lagged the U.S. in the AI race. DeepSeek suggests that the country has gained significant ground: The chatbot was built more quickly and with less money than analogous models in the U.S., and also appears to use less computing power. Software developers using DeepSeek pay roughly 95 percent less per word than they do with OpenAI’s top model. One prominent AI executive wrote that DeepSeek was a “wake up call for America.” Because DeepSeek appears to be cheaper and more efficient than similarly capable American AI models, the tech industry’s enormous investments in computer chips and data centers have been thrown into doubt—so much that the top AI chipmaker, Nvidia, lost $600 billion in market value on Monday, the largest single-day drop in U.S. history. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said that it was “invigorating to have a new competitor” and that, in response, the company would move up some new software announcements. (Yesterday morning, OpenAI said that it is investigating whether DeepSeek used ChatGPT outputs to train its own model.)

But many prominent American researchers and tech executives celebrated DeepSeek, as well. That’s because “the most notable feature of DeepSeek may be not that it is Chinese, but that it is relatively open,” I wrote on Monday. Whereas the top American AI labs at OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have kept their technology top-secret, DeepSeek published an in-depth technical report and is allowing anybody to download and modify the program’s code. “Being democratic—in the sense of vesting power in software developers and users—is precisely what has made DeepSeek a success,” I wrote. Start-ups and researchers love this relative transparency. In theory, competitors can use DeepSeek’s code and research to rapidly catch up to OpenAI with far fewer resources—you might not need colossal data centers to get to the front of the AI race. (The Atlantic recently entered into a corporate partnership with OpenAI.) However, there’s substantial uncertainty about just how much cheaper DeepSeek was to build, based on reports about the start-up’s hardware acquisitions and uncertainty about how the model was trained.

Meanwhile, for national-security hawks, the fear is that an open-source program that won’t answer questions about the Tiananmen Square protests could become a global technological touchpoint. DeepSeek could face similar privacy concerns as TikTok: Already, the U.S. Navy has banned its use, citing security concerns.

Any predictions, for now, are highly speculative. The global AI race is far from over, and forthcoming products from Silicon Valley could leap ahead once again. At the very least, U.S. tech companies may have to reconsider whether the best way to build AI is by keeping their models a secret.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

China’s DeepSeek Surprise

By Matteo Wong

One week ago, a new and formidable challenger for OpenAI’s throne emerged. A Chinese AI start-up, DeepSeek, launched a model that appeared to match the most powerful version of ChatGPT but, at least according to its creator, was a fraction of the cost to build. The program, called DeepSeek-R1, has incited plenty of concern: Ultrapowerful Chinese AI models are exactly what many leaders of American AI companies feared when they, and more recently President Donald Trump, have sounded alarms about a technological race between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. This is a “wake up call for America,” Alexandr Wang, the CEO of Scale AI, commented on social media.

But at the same time, many Americans—including much of the tech industry—appear to be lauding this Chinese AI. As of this morning, DeepSeek had overtaken ChatGPT as the top free application on Apple’s mobile-app store in the United States. Researchers, executives, and investors have been heaping on praise. The new DeepSeek model “is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen,” the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, an outspoken supporter of Trump, wrote on X. The program shows “the power of open research,” Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, wrote online.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

The GPT era is already ending: “The release of o1, in particular, has provided the clearest glimpse yet at what sort of synthetic ‘intelligence’ the start-up and companies following its lead believe they are building,” I wrote in December. The new AI panic: “The obsession with frontier models has now collided with mounting panic about China, fully intertwining ideas for the models’ regulation with national-security concerns,” Karen Hao wrote in 2023.

P.S.

After several major tech executives announced their support for Donald Trump, many liberal internet users are now alleging that they are being censored on certain social-media platforms. “To some, this pattern was as unmistakable as it was malicious,” my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany writes. “Social media was turning against Democrats.” And they are panicking.

— Matteo