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The latest artificial intelligence (AI) models launched by Chinese startup DeepSeek have caused turmoil in the technology sector after it emerged as a potential rival to major US-based companies.
DeepSeek wrote in a post last month that it trained its DeepSeek-V3 model with less than $6 million in computing power from what it claims were 2,000 Nvidia H800 chips to achieve a level of performance comparable to that of the most advanced models from OpenAI and Meta. .
These chips are less advanced than the most advanced chips on the market, which are subject to export controls, although DeepSeek claims to have overcome this drawback through innovative AI training techniques. DeepSeek’s AI assistant, which is based on the DeepSeek-V3 model, has surpassed OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the highest-rated free app on Apple’s US App Store.
The emergence of the China-based company has raised questions about major U.S. tech companies investing billions of dollars in advanced chips and large data centers used to train AI models. It also constitutes a “Sputnik moment” for the US-China AI race, following the perception that the US had an advantage over its geopolitical rival in this emerging field.
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DeepSeek’s AI assistant has surpassed OpenAI’s ChatGPT in the Apple App Store. (Christoph Dernbach/photo alliance via Getty Images / Getty Images)
The quality of DeepSeek’s models and their reported profitability changed the narrative that Chinese AI companies were lagging behind their American counterparts, which began after the first Chinese ChatGPT equivalent was released by Baidu.
The DeepSeek-R1 model was released last week and is 20 to 50 times cheaper to use than OpenAI’s o1 model, depending on the task, according to a post on the company’s official WeChat account.
The R1 model is also open source and available for free to users, while OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pro plan costs $200 per month.
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DeepSeek claims its model performs on par with the latest OpenAI and Anthropic models at a fraction of the cost. (Getty Images/Getty Images)
DeepSeek was established in late 2023 after majority shareholder Liang Wenfeng, co-founder of quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, decided to create a “new independent group, to explore the essence of [artificial general intelligence]”.
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is also a goal pursued by OpenAI, which defines AGI as autonomous systems that outperform humans at the most economically profitable tasks.
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Reuters contributed to this report.
