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Journalism of Courage
Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek has taken the world by storm, dominating Google Trends with over 5,00,000 searches in the past 24 hours. The company has surpassed OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the most downloaded app in the US and also triggered a wave of seismic shifts in global stock markets, particularly impacting tech-heavy indices like Nasdaq.
DeepSeek, based in China’s Hangzhou, has swiftly risen to fame with its innovative and cost-effective AI models, taking the Silicon Valley by surprise. The startup’s latest offerings, DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1, have outperformed industry giants like OpenAI, Meta, and Google, achieving capabilities at a fraction of their costs in what tech pundits are calling a ‘Sputnik moment’.
One of the top searches on Google is Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek. Wenfeng is a Chinese hedge fund manager who founded the startup in 2023, two years after he started buying thousands of Nvidia chips as part of an AI side project.
On X, DeepSeek catapulted to top trends and conversations surrounding the affordability, accuracy and its open-source code (which essentially allows anyone to build on top of them) took social media by storm.
The meteoric rise of DeepSeek has also rattled global markets. On Monday, the Nasdaq dropped by 3 per cent, marking its worst performance in two years. NVIDIA, a leading supplier of AI GPUs, lost $593 billion in its market value amid concerns about the competitive threat posed by DeepSeek.
DeepSeek’s models stand out due to their Mixture-of-Experts (MOE) architecture, a design that enables specialist models to collaborate for task-specific precision. The R1 model, unveiled earlier this month, introduced “test-time compute,” which shows its ability to think and explain its reasoning in real-time.
Sam Altman, whose OpenAI’s ChatGPT is poised to be DeepSeek’s biggest rival, called the R1 model “impressive” especially for the price.
“DeepSeek’s r1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they’re able to deliver for the price. We will obviously deliver much better models and also it’s legit invigorating to have a new competitor! We will pull up some releases,” Altman tweeted.
These advancements come at a reported cost of under $5 million, which in minuscule in comparison to the billions poured into AI development by American firms.
