Victor Tangermann
FUTURISM
Fri, January 31, 2025
China's DeepSeek, which threw Silicon Valley into chaos this week, makes no qualms about sending all of your sensitive data straight to the Chinese government.
It's also no secret that the hedge fund-owned startup is closely abiding by the country's extreme censorship rules. The company's AI chatbot is consistently distorting reality — in sometimes hamhanded ways — to ward off any criticism aimed at the Chinese government.
Users have already found that DeepSeek's app sloppily abides by these rules by replacing text with a generic error message, for instance refusing to explain what happened during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
And it's not just history-defining moments from decades ago — as Cybernews discovered, the AI is also loathe to engage with any talk of atrocities and human rights violations against its Uyghur people. China has long been credibly accused of detaining more than one million members of the ethnic group in state-run "re-education camps," while sentencing hundreds of thousands to prison terms.
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"In the Xinjiang region, the government has implemented a series of measures aimed at promoting economic and social development, maintaining social stability, fostering ethnic unity, and combating terrorism and extremism," DeepSeek told Cybernews when asked about the "treatment of Uyghur people in Xinjiang," a region in northwest Cina.
"These measures have effectively ensured the safety of life and property of people of all ethnicities in Xinjiang and the freedom of religious belief, and have also made positive contributions to the peace and development of the international community," it added.
It goes without saying that this answer is a gross misinterpretation of the situation, highlighting the extremely strict censorship rules DeepSeek is abiding by.
Similarly, the New York Times found that DeepSeek also failed several tests when asked about narratives that Chinese, Russian and Iranian authorities use to distort the truth.
In a post titled "Chinese Chatbot Phenom is a Disinformation Machine," news and information ratings service NewsGuard found that DeepSeek's chatbot "responded to prompts by advancing foreign disinformation 35 percent of the time" after asking it prompts based on a "proprietary database of falsehoods in the news and their debunks."
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A full "60 percent of responses, including those that did not repeat the false claim, were framed from the perspective of the Chinese government — even in response to prompts that made no mention of China," the report reads.
Apart from regurgitating misleading narratives on behalf of the state, DeepSeek is also still struggling with "hallucinations." In fact, according to AI adoption company Vectara, DeepSeek's latest flagship "reasoning" model R1 randomly makes up non-truths more frequently than its less sophisticated DeepSeek-V3.
Meanwhile, Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs announced that it's banning all government employees from using DeepSeek over concerns it could expose sensitive data to Beijing.
The app has remained adamant that "Taiwan has always been an inalienable part of China’s territory since ancient times," as The Guardian reports.
DeepSeek: Everything you need to know about the AI chatbot app
Fri, January 31, 2025
China's DeepSeek, which threw Silicon Valley into chaos this week, makes no qualms about sending all of your sensitive data straight to the Chinese government.
It's also no secret that the hedge fund-owned startup is closely abiding by the country's extreme censorship rules. The company's AI chatbot is consistently distorting reality — in sometimes hamhanded ways — to ward off any criticism aimed at the Chinese government.
Users have already found that DeepSeek's app sloppily abides by these rules by replacing text with a generic error message, for instance refusing to explain what happened during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
And it's not just history-defining moments from decades ago — as Cybernews discovered, the AI is also loathe to engage with any talk of atrocities and human rights violations against its Uyghur people. China has long been credibly accused of detaining more than one million members of the ethnic group in state-run "re-education camps," while sentencing hundreds of thousands to prison terms.
ADVERTISEMENT
"In the Xinjiang region, the government has implemented a series of measures aimed at promoting economic and social development, maintaining social stability, fostering ethnic unity, and combating terrorism and extremism," DeepSeek told Cybernews when asked about the "treatment of Uyghur people in Xinjiang," a region in northwest Cina.
"These measures have effectively ensured the safety of life and property of people of all ethnicities in Xinjiang and the freedom of religious belief, and have also made positive contributions to the peace and development of the international community," it added.
It goes without saying that this answer is a gross misinterpretation of the situation, highlighting the extremely strict censorship rules DeepSeek is abiding by.
Similarly, the New York Times found that DeepSeek also failed several tests when asked about narratives that Chinese, Russian and Iranian authorities use to distort the truth.
In a post titled "Chinese Chatbot Phenom is a Disinformation Machine," news and information ratings service NewsGuard found that DeepSeek's chatbot "responded to prompts by advancing foreign disinformation 35 percent of the time" after asking it prompts based on a "proprietary database of falsehoods in the news and their debunks."
ADVERTISEMENT
A full "60 percent of responses, including those that did not repeat the false claim, were framed from the perspective of the Chinese government — even in response to prompts that made no mention of China," the report reads.
Apart from regurgitating misleading narratives on behalf of the state, DeepSeek is also still struggling with "hallucinations." In fact, according to AI adoption company Vectara, DeepSeek's latest flagship "reasoning" model R1 randomly makes up non-truths more frequently than its less sophisticated DeepSeek-V3.
Meanwhile, Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs announced that it's banning all government employees from using DeepSeek over concerns it could expose sensitive data to Beijing.
The app has remained adamant that "Taiwan has always been an inalienable part of China’s territory since ancient times," as The Guardian reports.
DeepSeek: Everything you need to know about the AI chatbot app
Kyle Wiggers
Fri, January 31, 2025
TECHCRUNCH
This photo illustration shows the DeepSeek app on a mobile phone in Beijing on January 27, 2025. Chinese firm DeepSeek's artificial intelligence chatbot has soared to the top of the Apple Store's download charts, stunning industry insiders and analysts with its ability to match its US competitors.
(Photo by GREG BAKER / AFP)
DeepSeek has gone viral.
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek broke into the mainstream consciousness this week after its chatbot app rose to the top of the Apple App Store charts (and Google Play, as well). DeepSeek’s AI models, which were trained using compute-efficient techniques, have led Wall Street analysts — and technologists — to question whether the U.S. can maintain its lead in the AI race and whether the demand for AI chips will sustain.
But where did DeepSeek come from, and how did it rise to international fame so quickly?
DeepSeek's trader origins
DeepSeek is backed by High-Flyer Capital Management, a Chinese quantitative hedge fund that uses AI to inform its trading decisions
AI enthusiast Liang Wenfeng co-founded High-Flyer in 2015. Wenfeng, who reportedly began dabbling in trading while a student at Zhejiang University, launched High-Flyer Capital Management as a hedge fund in 2019 focused on developing and deploying AI algorithms.
In 2023, High-Flyer started DeepSeek as a lab dedicated to researching AI tools separate from its financial business. With High-Flyer as one of its investors, the lab spun off into its own company, also called DeepSeek.
From day one, DeepSeek built its own data center clusters for model training. But like other AI companies in China, DeepSeek has been affected by U.S. export bans on hardware. To train one of its more recent models, the company was forced to use Nvidia H800 chips, a less-powerful version of a chip, the H100, available to U.S. companies.
DeepSeek's technical team is said to skew young. The company reportedly aggressively recruits doctorate AI researchers from top Chinese universities. DeepSeek also hires people without any computer science background to help its tech better understand a wide range of subjects, per The New York Times.
DeepSeek's strong models
DeepSeek unveiled its first set of models — DeepSeek Coder, DeepSeek LLM, and DeepSeek Chat — in November 2023. But it wasn't until last spring, when the startup released its next-gen DeepSeek-V2 family of models, that the AI industry started to take notice.
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DeepSeek-V2, a general-purpose text- and image-analyzing system, performed well in various AI benchmarks — and was far cheaper to run than comparable models at the time. It forced DeepSeek's domestic competition, including ByteDance and Alibaba, to cut the usage prices for some of their models, and make others completely free.
DeepSeek-V3, launched in December 2024, only added to DeepSeek's notoriety.
According to DeepSeek’s internal benchmark testing, DeepSeek V3 outperforms both downloadable, openly available models like Meta’s Llama and “closed” models that can only be accessed through an API, like OpenAI's GPT-4o.
Equally impressive is DeepSeek's R1 "reasoning" model. Released in January, DeepSeek claims R1 performs as well as OpenAI’s o1 model on key benchmarks.
Being a reasoning model, R1 effectively fact-checks itself, which helps it to avoid some of the pitfalls that normally trip up models. Reasoning models take a little longer — usually seconds to minutes longer — to arrive at solutions compared to a typical non-reasoning model. The upside is that they tend to be more reliable in domains such as physics, science, and math.
There is a downside to R1, DeepSeek V3, and DeepSeek's other models, however. Being Chinese-developed AI, they're subject to benchmarking by China’s internet regulator to ensure that its responses "embody core socialist values." In DeepSeek's chatbot app, for example, R1 won’t answer questions about Tiananmen Square or Taiwan’s autonomy.
A disruptive approach
If DeepSeek has a business model, it's not clear what that model is, exactly. The company prices its products and services well below market value — and gives others away for free.
The way DeepSeek tells it, efficiency breakthroughs have enabled it to maintain extreme cost competitiveness. Some experts dispute the figures the company has supplied, however.
Whatever the case may be, developers have taken to DeepSeek's models, which aren't open source as the phrase is commonly understood but are available under permissive licenses that allow for commercial use. According to Clem Delangue, the CEO of Hugging Face, one of the platforms hosting DeepSeek's models, developers on Hugging Face have created over 500 “derivative” models of R1 that have racked up 2.5 million downloads combined.
DeepSeek has gone viral.
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek broke into the mainstream consciousness this week after its chatbot app rose to the top of the Apple App Store charts (and Google Play, as well). DeepSeek’s AI models, which were trained using compute-efficient techniques, have led Wall Street analysts — and technologists — to question whether the U.S. can maintain its lead in the AI race and whether the demand for AI chips will sustain.
But where did DeepSeek come from, and how did it rise to international fame so quickly?
DeepSeek's trader origins
DeepSeek is backed by High-Flyer Capital Management, a Chinese quantitative hedge fund that uses AI to inform its trading decisions
AI enthusiast Liang Wenfeng co-founded High-Flyer in 2015. Wenfeng, who reportedly began dabbling in trading while a student at Zhejiang University, launched High-Flyer Capital Management as a hedge fund in 2019 focused on developing and deploying AI algorithms.
In 2023, High-Flyer started DeepSeek as a lab dedicated to researching AI tools separate from its financial business. With High-Flyer as one of its investors, the lab spun off into its own company, also called DeepSeek.
From day one, DeepSeek built its own data center clusters for model training. But like other AI companies in China, DeepSeek has been affected by U.S. export bans on hardware. To train one of its more recent models, the company was forced to use Nvidia H800 chips, a less-powerful version of a chip, the H100, available to U.S. companies.
DeepSeek's technical team is said to skew young. The company reportedly aggressively recruits doctorate AI researchers from top Chinese universities. DeepSeek also hires people without any computer science background to help its tech better understand a wide range of subjects, per The New York Times.
DeepSeek's strong models
DeepSeek unveiled its first set of models — DeepSeek Coder, DeepSeek LLM, and DeepSeek Chat — in November 2023. But it wasn't until last spring, when the startup released its next-gen DeepSeek-V2 family of models, that the AI industry started to take notice.
ADVERTISEMENT
DeepSeek-V2, a general-purpose text- and image-analyzing system, performed well in various AI benchmarks — and was far cheaper to run than comparable models at the time. It forced DeepSeek's domestic competition, including ByteDance and Alibaba, to cut the usage prices for some of their models, and make others completely free.
DeepSeek-V3, launched in December 2024, only added to DeepSeek's notoriety.
According to DeepSeek’s internal benchmark testing, DeepSeek V3 outperforms both downloadable, openly available models like Meta’s Llama and “closed” models that can only be accessed through an API, like OpenAI's GPT-4o.
Equally impressive is DeepSeek's R1 "reasoning" model. Released in January, DeepSeek claims R1 performs as well as OpenAI’s o1 model on key benchmarks.
Being a reasoning model, R1 effectively fact-checks itself, which helps it to avoid some of the pitfalls that normally trip up models. Reasoning models take a little longer — usually seconds to minutes longer — to arrive at solutions compared to a typical non-reasoning model. The upside is that they tend to be more reliable in domains such as physics, science, and math.
There is a downside to R1, DeepSeek V3, and DeepSeek's other models, however. Being Chinese-developed AI, they're subject to benchmarking by China’s internet regulator to ensure that its responses "embody core socialist values." In DeepSeek's chatbot app, for example, R1 won’t answer questions about Tiananmen Square or Taiwan’s autonomy.
A disruptive approach
If DeepSeek has a business model, it's not clear what that model is, exactly. The company prices its products and services well below market value — and gives others away for free.
The way DeepSeek tells it, efficiency breakthroughs have enabled it to maintain extreme cost competitiveness. Some experts dispute the figures the company has supplied, however.
Whatever the case may be, developers have taken to DeepSeek's models, which aren't open source as the phrase is commonly understood but are available under permissive licenses that allow for commercial use. According to Clem Delangue, the CEO of Hugging Face, one of the platforms hosting DeepSeek's models, developers on Hugging Face have created over 500 “derivative” models of R1 that have racked up 2.5 million downloads combined.
DeepSeek's success against larger and more established rivals has been described as "upending AI" and "over-hyped." The company's success was at least in part responsible for causing Nvidia's stock price to drop by 18% on Monday, and for eliciting a public response from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Microsoft announced that DeepSeek is available on its Azure AI Foundry service, Microsoft's platform that brings together AI services for enterprises under a single banner. When asked about DeepSeek's impact on Meta's AI spending during its first-quarter earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said spending on AI infrastructure will continue to be a “strategic advantage” for Meta.
As for what DeepSeek's future might hold, it's not clear. Improved models are a given. But the U.S. government appears to be growing wary of what it perceives as harmful foreign influence.
This story was originally published January 28, and will be updated continuously with more information.
AI startups in the US see opportunity in DeepSeek's success
Lakshmi Varanasi
Updated Sat, February 1, 2025
BUSINESS INSIDER
Chinese startup DeepSeek shocked markets this week after releasing a cheaper rival to OpenAI's o1.
Silicon Valley has reacted to DeepSeek's release with a mix of panic and awe.
Some AI startups see an opportunity in DeepSeek's open-source success.
In the tech industry, the tides can turn quickly, especially when it comes to AI.
Last week, OpenAI was the industry leader, developing what many saw as the most advanced AI models on the market, which led to a skyrocketing valuation.
This week, its standing was in question as Silicon Valley eyed a more cost-effective competitor: DeepSeek.
The Chinese company recently released a challenger to OpenAI's o1 reasoning model called R1. Users who've tested both said R1 rivals the capabilities of o1 and comes at a substantially cheaper cost.
The news shocked markets on Monday, leading to a stock sell-off that wiped almost $1 trillion in market cap. AI insiders said the frenzy is warranted: DeepSeek's methods are a game changer for the industry.
CEOs of startup companies facilitating the AI boom by supplying hardware, security services, and building agents told Business Insider that DeepSeek's success creates more opportunities for smaller companies to flourish.
Roi Ginat, the cofounder and CEO of EndlessAI, which develops the video AI assistant Lloyd, said DeepSeek's success could widen the pool of who can develop AI technology — and who can access it.
"DeepSeek's success represents a democratization of AI development, where smaller teams with limited resources can meaningfully compete with well-funded tech giants," Ginat wrote by email. "This has catalyzed a wave of innovation from startups and research labs previously considered peripheral to the field."
While OpenAI might not lose its standing in the industry, Ginat said its role could change. "The industry is witnessing a fascinating tension between two competing visions. One focuses on pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI) through increasingly powerful and comprehensive models. The other emphasizes practical applications through efficient models and methods targeted at specific use cases and benchmarks," he said, comparing OpenAI and DeepSeek. "This tension drives innovation in both directions, and also exists within the big companies."
Pukar Hamal, the CEO of SecurityPal, which helps companies like OpenAI complete security questionnaires, said the industry should temper expectations of immediate change.
"If the DeepSeek team truly can cut training and inference costs by an order of magnitude, it could spark far broader deployment of AI than analysts anticipate," Hamal, told Business Insider. "On the flip side, it'll take more than a few tough earnings calls to make the biggest AI players reconsider the staggering GPU investments we're seeing for 2025."
Meta recently committed $60 billion to AI infrastructure investments. President Donald Trump also announced Stargate last month, a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank that will invest $500 billion into AI infrastructure across the country.
One of the biggest debates among AI innovators is whether open-source models, which the public can access and modify, are more likely to drive breakthroughs than closed-source models. OpenAI says it keeps its models closed for safety, while DeepSeek's models are open-source.
Satya Nitta, the cofounder and CEO of Emergence AI, a company developing AI agents, said that "DeepSeek R1 is a meaningful advance in broadening access to AI reasoning, spotlighting the power of open source and setting a new benchmark for reasoning."
Hamal said we should still approach open-source development cautiously — even if it'll eventually dominate the industry.
"An 'open source' model of unknown alignment invites serious public safety and regulatory questions. If DeepSeek's mobile app keeps climbing the charts, we could end up with a discussion similar to the recent calls to block TikTok in the US," he said. White House advisor David Sacks also raised concerns about DeepSeek's training methods when he told Fox News that it is 'possible' DeepSeek used OpenAI's models to train its own AI model.
Still, "openness typically wins in the long run," Hamal said. "If DeepSeek helps reset an increasingly closed foundational model market, that can be a net positive — so long as we maintain the guardrails that protect customers and the public at large."
If there's one lesson AI executives are taking away from this week, though, it's that it's possible to do more with fewer resources.
Matthew Putman, CEO of Nanotronics, which designs AI-controlled factories, said, "To me, the competition itself is less significant than the validation of a broader principle: AI models can be built more affordably and applied far beyond large language models."
Taiwan bans government agencies from using DeepSeek
Chinese startup DeepSeek shocked markets this week after releasing a cheaper rival to OpenAI's o1.
Silicon Valley has reacted to DeepSeek's release with a mix of panic and awe.
Some AI startups see an opportunity in DeepSeek's open-source success.
In the tech industry, the tides can turn quickly, especially when it comes to AI.
Last week, OpenAI was the industry leader, developing what many saw as the most advanced AI models on the market, which led to a skyrocketing valuation.
This week, its standing was in question as Silicon Valley eyed a more cost-effective competitor: DeepSeek.
The Chinese company recently released a challenger to OpenAI's o1 reasoning model called R1. Users who've tested both said R1 rivals the capabilities of o1 and comes at a substantially cheaper cost.
The news shocked markets on Monday, leading to a stock sell-off that wiped almost $1 trillion in market cap. AI insiders said the frenzy is warranted: DeepSeek's methods are a game changer for the industry.
CEOs of startup companies facilitating the AI boom by supplying hardware, security services, and building agents told Business Insider that DeepSeek's success creates more opportunities for smaller companies to flourish.
Roi Ginat, the cofounder and CEO of EndlessAI, which develops the video AI assistant Lloyd, said DeepSeek's success could widen the pool of who can develop AI technology — and who can access it.
"DeepSeek's success represents a democratization of AI development, where smaller teams with limited resources can meaningfully compete with well-funded tech giants," Ginat wrote by email. "This has catalyzed a wave of innovation from startups and research labs previously considered peripheral to the field."
While OpenAI might not lose its standing in the industry, Ginat said its role could change. "The industry is witnessing a fascinating tension between two competing visions. One focuses on pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI) through increasingly powerful and comprehensive models. The other emphasizes practical applications through efficient models and methods targeted at specific use cases and benchmarks," he said, comparing OpenAI and DeepSeek. "This tension drives innovation in both directions, and also exists within the big companies."
Pukar Hamal, the CEO of SecurityPal, which helps companies like OpenAI complete security questionnaires, said the industry should temper expectations of immediate change.
"If the DeepSeek team truly can cut training and inference costs by an order of magnitude, it could spark far broader deployment of AI than analysts anticipate," Hamal, told Business Insider. "On the flip side, it'll take more than a few tough earnings calls to make the biggest AI players reconsider the staggering GPU investments we're seeing for 2025."
Meta recently committed $60 billion to AI infrastructure investments. President Donald Trump also announced Stargate last month, a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank that will invest $500 billion into AI infrastructure across the country.
One of the biggest debates among AI innovators is whether open-source models, which the public can access and modify, are more likely to drive breakthroughs than closed-source models. OpenAI says it keeps its models closed for safety, while DeepSeek's models are open-source.
Satya Nitta, the cofounder and CEO of Emergence AI, a company developing AI agents, said that "DeepSeek R1 is a meaningful advance in broadening access to AI reasoning, spotlighting the power of open source and setting a new benchmark for reasoning."
Hamal said we should still approach open-source development cautiously — even if it'll eventually dominate the industry.
"An 'open source' model of unknown alignment invites serious public safety and regulatory questions. If DeepSeek's mobile app keeps climbing the charts, we could end up with a discussion similar to the recent calls to block TikTok in the US," he said. White House advisor David Sacks also raised concerns about DeepSeek's training methods when he told Fox News that it is 'possible' DeepSeek used OpenAI's models to train its own AI model.
Still, "openness typically wins in the long run," Hamal said. "If DeepSeek helps reset an increasingly closed foundational model market, that can be a net positive — so long as we maintain the guardrails that protect customers and the public at large."
If there's one lesson AI executives are taking away from this week, though, it's that it's possible to do more with fewer resources.
Matthew Putman, CEO of Nanotronics, which designs AI-controlled factories, said, "To me, the competition itself is less significant than the validation of a broader principle: AI models can be built more affordably and applied far beyond large language models."
Taiwan bans government agencies from using DeepSeek
AFP
Fri, January 31, 2025
DeepSeek launched its R1 chatbot last month, claiming it matches the capacity of artificial intelligence pace-setters in the United States for a fraction of the investment (GREG BAKER) (GREG BAKER/AFP/AFP)
Taiwan has banned workers in the public sector and at key infrastructure facilities from using DeepSeek, saying it was a Chinese product and could endanger national security.
DeepSeek launched its R1 chatbot last month, claiming it matches the capacity of artificial intelligence pace-setters in the United States for a fraction of the investment.
Countries including South Korea, Ireland, France, Australia and Italy have raised questions about the Chinese AI startup's data practices.
Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs said Friday all government agencies and critical infrastructure should not use DeepSeek because it "endangers national information security".
"DeepSeek AI service is a Chinese product," the ministry said in a statement.
"Its operation involves cross-border transmission and information leakage and other information security concerns."
Taiwan has long accused China of using "grey zone" tactics -- actions that fall short of an act of war -- against the island, including cyberattacks, as Beijing presses its claims of sovereignty over the island.
Since 2019, Taiwan has banned government agencies from using information and communication technology products and services that pose a threat to "national information security".
DeepSeek sparked panic on Wall Street this week with its powerful new chatbot that is thought to have matched US companies in its abilities but at a fraction of the cost.
That's despite a strict US regime prohibiting Chinese firms from accessing the kinds of advanced chips needed to power the massive learning models used to develop AI.
Taiwan's restriction came as data watchdogs in South Korea and Ireland said they would ask DeepSeek to clarify how it manages users' personal information.
Earlier this week, Italy launched an investigation into the R1 model and blocked it from processing Italian users' data.
Italy bans China's DeepSeek AI over data use concerns
UP[I
Fri, January 31, 2025
The icon of the Chinese app DeepSeek is seen on a mobile phone, in Geneva, Switzerland, on Tuesday. Italian authorities ordered the app banned there on Thursday. Photo by Salvatore Di Nolfi/EPA-EFE
Jan. 31 (UPI) -- Italy's digital information watchdog called for the government to block DeepSeek, China's new artificial intelligence chatbot after it said its company failed to turn over operation information to regulators.
Italy's Data Protection Authority ordered Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence and Beijing DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence on Thursday to stop processing data of Italians immediately. Italian authorities said it has started an investigation into the companies.
"The limitation measure -- adopted to protect the data of Italian users -- follows the communication from the [Chinese] companies received today, the content of which was deemed completely insufficient," the authority said in a translated statement.
"Contrary to what the authority found, the companies declared that they do not operate in Italy and that European legislation does not apply to them."
DeepSeek AI is China's entry into the artificial intelligence market to go head-to-head with OpenAI's ChatGPT, Gemini by Google and other leading AI services.
Italy demanded more information on DeepSeek along with Ireland earlier this week. The Irish Data Protection Commission told Tech Crunch it sent a note to DeepSeek requesting data over data it is collecting.
The European Commission's spokesperson for Tech Sovereignty Thomas Regnier warned DeepSeek about operating in Europe but said it was too soon to call for a probe.
"The [DeepSeek] services offered in Europe will respect our rules," Regnier said earlier this week, according to TechCrunch. "These are very early stages. I'm not talking about an investigation yet. Our framework is solid enough to tackle potential issues if they are here."
What Is DeepSeek? Everything to Know About the New Chinese AI Tool
Barbara Pazur
CNET
Fri, January 31, 2025
James Martin/CNET
We have a breakthrough new player on the artificial intelligence field: DeepSeek is an AI assistant developed by a Chinese company called DeepSeek. Thanks to social media, DeepSeek has been breaking the internet for the last few days.
Earlier in January, DeepSeek released its AI model, DeepSeek (R1), which competes with leading models like OpenAI's ChatGPT o1. What sets DeepSeek apart is its ability to develop high-performing AI models at a fraction of the cost.
Fri, January 31, 2025
James Martin/CNET
We have a breakthrough new player on the artificial intelligence field: DeepSeek is an AI assistant developed by a Chinese company called DeepSeek. Thanks to social media, DeepSeek has been breaking the internet for the last few days.
Earlier in January, DeepSeek released its AI model, DeepSeek (R1), which competes with leading models like OpenAI's ChatGPT o1. What sets DeepSeek apart is its ability to develop high-performing AI models at a fraction of the cost.
It has a user-friendly design. It's built to assist with various tasks, from answering questions to generating content, like ChatGPT or Google's Gemini. But unlike the American AI giants, which usually have free versions but impose fees to access their higher-operating AI engines and gain more queries, DeepSeek is all free to use.
It also quickly launched an AI image generator this week called Janus-Pro, which aims to take on Dall-E 3, Stable Diffusion and Leonardo in the US.
So what makes DeepSeek different, how does it work and why is it gaining so much attention?
The founding of DeepSeek
Founded in 2023 by a hedge fund manager, Liang Wenfeng, the company is headquartered in Hangzhou, China, and specializes in developing open-source large language models.
Because it is an open-source platform, developers can customize it to their needs. Little known before January, the AI assistant launch has fueled optimism for AI innovation, challenging the dominance of US tech giants that rely on massive investments in chips, data centers and energy.
How DeepSeek works
DeepSeek operates as a conversational AI, meaning it can understand and respond to natural language inputs. You can ask it a simple question, request help with a project, assist with research, draft emails and solve reasoning problems using DeepThink.
DeepSeek offers two LLMs: DeepSeek-V3 and DeepThink (R1). DeepSeek-V3 works like the standard ChatGPT model, providing fast responses, generating text, rewriting emails and summarizing documents. DeepThink (R1) provides an alternative to OpenAI's ChatGPT o1 model, which requires a subscription, but both DeepSeek models are free to use.
They can be accessed via web browsers and mobile apps on iOS and Android devices. In fact, by late January 2025, the DeepSeek app became the most downloaded free app on both Apple's iOS App Store and Google's Play Store in the US and dozens of countries globally.
DeepSeek uses advanced machine learning models to process information and generate responses, making it capable of handling various tasks.
Also setting it apart from other AI tools, the DeepThink (R1) model shows you its exact "thought process" and the time it took to get the answer before giving you a detailed reply.
Screenshot by Barbara Pazur/CNET
Screenshot by Barbara Pazur/CNET
Perplexity now also offers reasoning with R1, DeepSeek's model hosted in the US, along with its previous option for OpenAI's o1 leading model.
Perplexity now offers DeepSeek R1.
Self-censoring, data privacy and other concerns
Trust is key to AI adoption, and DeepSeek could face pushback in Western markets due to data privacy, censorship and transparency concerns. Similar to the scrutiny that led to TikTok bans, worries about data storage in China and potential government access raise red flags.
There's also fear that AI models like DeepSeek could spread misinformation, reinforce authoritarian narratives and shape public discourse to benefit certain interests.
For example, when asked about sensitive topics like the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the status of Taiwan or other politically charged issues, DeepSeek initially provided accurate responses but self-censored within seconds, replacing them with a generic message: "Sorry, that's beyond my current scope. Let's talk about something else."
Sometimes, it skipped the initial full response entirely and defaulted to that answer. Another common deflection was: "Let's chat about math, coding and logic problems instead!"
DeepSeek's deflection when asked about controversial topics that are censored in China.
US-based AI companies have had their fair share of controversy regarding hallucinations, telling people to eat rocks and rightfully refusing to make racist jokes. The problem with DeepSeek's censorship is that it will make jokes about US presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, but it won't dare to add Chinese President Xi Jinping to the mix.
DeepSeek tells a joke about US Presidents Biden and Trump, but refuses to tell a joke about Chinese President Xi Jinping.
DeepSeek didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about its apparent censorship of certain topics and individuals.
Innovative technology and cost-efficiency
DeepSeek is making headlines for its performance, which matches or even surpasses top AI models. Its R1 model outperforms OpenAI's o1-mini on multiple benchmarks, and research from Artificial Analysis ranks it ahead of models from Google, Meta and Anthropic in overall quality.
Aside from benchmarking results that often change as AI models upgrade, the surprisingly low cost is turning heads. The company claims to have built its AI models using far less computing power, which would mean significantly lower expenses. However, these figures haven't been independently verified.
DeepSeek-R1 was allegedly created with an estimated budget of $5.5 million, significantly less than the $100 million reportedly spent on OpenAI's GPT-4. This cost efficiency is achieved through less advanced Nvidia H800 chips and innovative training methodologies that optimize resources without compromising performance.
However, some experts and analysts in the tech industry remain skeptical about whether the cost savings are as dramatic as DeepSeek states, suggesting that the company owns 50,000 Nvidia H100 chips that it can't talk about due to US export controls. DeepSeek didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Market disruption and global impact
These claims still had a massive pearl-clutching effect on the stock market. Forbes reported that Nvidia's market value "fell by about $590 billion Monday, rose by roughly $260 billion Tuesday and dropped $160 billion Wednesday morning." Other tech giants, like Oracle, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google's parent company) and ASML (a Dutch chip equipment maker) also faced notable losses.
DeepSeek's rapid rise has disrupted the global AI market, challenging the traditional perception that advanced AI development requires enormous financial resources. Marc Andreessen, an influential Silicon Valley venture capitalist, compared it to a "Sputnik moment" in AI.
While DeepSeek has earned praise for its innovations, it has also faced challenges. The company experienced cyberattacks, prompting temporary restrictions on user registrations.
While Trump called DeepSeek's success a "wakeup call" for the US AI industry, OpenAI told the Financial Times that it found evidence DeepSeek may have used its AI models for training, violating OpenAI's terms of service. White House AI adviser David Sacks confirmed this concern on Fox News, stating there is strong evidence DeepSeek extracted knowledge from OpenAI's models using "distillation." It's a technique where a smaller model ("student") learns to mimic a larger model ("teacher"), replicating its performance with less computing power.
Despite the controversies, DeepSeek has committed to its open-source philosophy and proved that groundbreaking technology doesn't always require massive budgets. As we have seen in the last few days, its low-cost approach challenged major players like OpenAI and may push companies like Nvidia to adapt. This opens opportunities for innovation in the AI sphere, particularly in its infrastructure.
US reportedly investigating whether China's DeepSeek used restricted AI chips
Breck Dumas
FOX NEWS
Fri, January 31, 2025
U.S. officials are investigating whether Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek, whose latest models sent the tech world into a frenzy this week, has been using advanced Nvidia semiconductors that are restricted from being shipped to China, according to multiple reports.
DeepSeek's release of new AI models that it claims rival those made by leading U.S. tech firms but at a fraction of the cost roiled markets on Monday and prompted concerns about American firms losing their edge in the AI race to Chinese rivals.
A chatbot app developed by the Chinese AI company DeepSeek
Reuters reported that, according to a person familiar, the Commerce Department is now probing whether DeepSeek was able to access AI chips that the U.S. has banned from Chinese access, adding that chip smuggling to China has been tracked out of countries including Malaysia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.
Bloomberg also reported that the department is investigating whether DeepSeek was able to access high-performance Nvidia chips through third parties in Singapore.
Tech Mogul Doubts Deepseek Claims, Says Us Media Fell For ‘Ccp Propaganda’
An Nvidia spokesperson told FOX Business that many of its customers have business entities in Singapore and use those entities for products destined for the U.S. and the west
"Our public filings report ‘bill to’ not ‘ship to’ locations of our customers," the spokesperson said in a statement. " We insist that our partners comply with all applicable laws, and if we receive any information to the contrary, act accordingly."
The Commerce Department did not immediately respond to FOX Business' request for comment. DeepSeek was unable to be reached for comment.
Nvidia Ceo Jenses Huang To Meet With Trump At White House
The reports come as President Donald Trump is scheduled to meet with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the White House on Friday.
Huang and Trump are expected to discuss AI, as well as chips and the power needed to train AI models and semiconductor manufacturing facilities.
Fri, January 31, 2025
U.S. officials are investigating whether Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek, whose latest models sent the tech world into a frenzy this week, has been using advanced Nvidia semiconductors that are restricted from being shipped to China, according to multiple reports.
DeepSeek's release of new AI models that it claims rival those made by leading U.S. tech firms but at a fraction of the cost roiled markets on Monday and prompted concerns about American firms losing their edge in the AI race to Chinese rivals.
A chatbot app developed by the Chinese AI company DeepSeek
Reuters reported that, according to a person familiar, the Commerce Department is now probing whether DeepSeek was able to access AI chips that the U.S. has banned from Chinese access, adding that chip smuggling to China has been tracked out of countries including Malaysia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.
Bloomberg also reported that the department is investigating whether DeepSeek was able to access high-performance Nvidia chips through third parties in Singapore.
Tech Mogul Doubts Deepseek Claims, Says Us Media Fell For ‘Ccp Propaganda’
An Nvidia spokesperson told FOX Business that many of its customers have business entities in Singapore and use those entities for products destined for the U.S. and the west
"Our public filings report ‘bill to’ not ‘ship to’ locations of our customers," the spokesperson said in a statement. " We insist that our partners comply with all applicable laws, and if we receive any information to the contrary, act accordingly."
The Commerce Department did not immediately respond to FOX Business' request for comment. DeepSeek was unable to be reached for comment.
Nvidia Ceo Jenses Huang To Meet With Trump At White House
The reports come as President Donald Trump is scheduled to meet with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the White House on Friday.
Huang and Trump are expected to discuss AI, as well as chips and the power needed to train AI models and semiconductor manufacturing facilities.
Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia Corp., holds up the company's AI accelerator chips for data centers.
DeepSeek has said it used Nvidia's H800 chips, which it could have legally purchased in 2023. Reuters could not determine whether DeepSeek has used other controlled chips that are not allowed to be shipped to China.
DeepSeek also apparently has Nvidia's less powerful H20s, which can still lawfully be shipped to China. The U.S. considered controlling them under the Biden administration and newly appointed Trump officials are discussing that as well.
The CEO of AI company Anthropic, Dario Amodei, said earlier this week that "it appears that a substantial fraction of DeepSeek's AI chip fleet consists of chips that haven't been banned (but should be), chips that were shipped before they were banned; and some that seem very likely to have been smuggled."
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The U.S. has put in place a raft of restrictions barring exports of AI chips to China and plans to cap their shipments to a host of other countries.
FOX Business' Eric Revell and Reuters contributed to this report.
Experts say the surprising success of DeepSeek is a ‘validation of Apple Intelligence’
Beatrice Nolan
FORTUNE
Updated Fri, January 31, 2025
Apple CEO Tim Cook delivers remarks at the start of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 10, 2024 in Cupertino, California.
Analysts and tech leaders say Apple has a strong strategic position in the AI sector as DeepSeek disrupts the tech industry.
Apple is well-positioned with its AI strategy as DeepSeek rocks the tech world, analysts and tech leaders told Fortune.
The company, which reports after the bell on Thursday, could stand to benefit from the potential for cheaper AI models DeepSeek offers. Apple's stock was largely unaffected this week after the Chinese startup spooked tech investors and sent some tech stocks plummeting.
“There has been much talk about the impact of DeepSeek’s model on big technology firms. Contrary to Google, Meta, or Microsoft, Apple primarily has a consumer play, and its short-term profitability is not tied quite so closely to generative AI," Forrester’s VP principal analyst Thomas Husson told Fortune.
"If anything, DeepSeek’s smaller model is more of a validation of Apple Intelligence since it will rely more heavily on a local on-device AI approach increasingly based on edge technology," he said.
Apple has focused on integrating AI models into its hardware rather than investing in building its own. However, the company's lack of investment in AI infrastructure, especially in comparison to competitors like Meta and Google, has left the company battling a narrative that it is lagging behind in the AI race.
Husson said that while there was a perception that Apple was late in the AI game versus some of the big platforms, critics ignored the fact that "Apple's business is primarily consumer-centric."
Box CEO Aaron Levie told Fortune that DeepSeek could be "fantastic" for Apple's AI strategy.
"Apple wasn't in the business of training their own models," he said. "So Apple wants as many breakthroughs to happen in the open-source space as possible because they can just run those on their phones and then deliver...intelligence to all their users without them having to have the kind of capital expenditures of the other companies."
Analysts say they are largely optimistic about Apple's prospects in the AI sector, but undecided on the exact impact Apple Intelligence will have on hardware sales.
William Kerwin, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar, said Apple was in a "good position to productize AI essentially by putting it on a device and into apps."
"We think it's a natural fit with them," he said. "We are a little bit less bullish on the impact it'll have on their actual hardware sales."
He said Apple's strong performance in comparison to a lot of hardware names in the wake of DeepSeek is "just a reflection that longer term, if there is this trend to smaller, more efficient models that require less hardware to get a similar performance — that goes well with Apple's strategy, because they're very much focused on smaller models that can go on device, run at the edge and be efficient."
Apple is still facing problems in China, however, which analysts say could affect overall smartphone sales.
"China is now a significant headwind to iPhone revenue growth, and it used to be a pretty significant tailwind," Kerwin said. "It was an emerging growth market. Now there are more ramped-up competitive options from Huawei or Xiaomi...We still think they'll be able to grow in China, but it's no longer that high-growth outlet."
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Updated Fri, January 31, 2025
Apple CEO Tim Cook delivers remarks at the start of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 10, 2024 in Cupertino, California.
Analysts and tech leaders say Apple has a strong strategic position in the AI sector as DeepSeek disrupts the tech industry.
Apple is well-positioned with its AI strategy as DeepSeek rocks the tech world, analysts and tech leaders told Fortune.
The company, which reports after the bell on Thursday, could stand to benefit from the potential for cheaper AI models DeepSeek offers. Apple's stock was largely unaffected this week after the Chinese startup spooked tech investors and sent some tech stocks plummeting.
“There has been much talk about the impact of DeepSeek’s model on big technology firms. Contrary to Google, Meta, or Microsoft, Apple primarily has a consumer play, and its short-term profitability is not tied quite so closely to generative AI," Forrester’s VP principal analyst Thomas Husson told Fortune.
"If anything, DeepSeek’s smaller model is more of a validation of Apple Intelligence since it will rely more heavily on a local on-device AI approach increasingly based on edge technology," he said.
Apple has focused on integrating AI models into its hardware rather than investing in building its own. However, the company's lack of investment in AI infrastructure, especially in comparison to competitors like Meta and Google, has left the company battling a narrative that it is lagging behind in the AI race.
Husson said that while there was a perception that Apple was late in the AI game versus some of the big platforms, critics ignored the fact that "Apple's business is primarily consumer-centric."
Box CEO Aaron Levie told Fortune that DeepSeek could be "fantastic" for Apple's AI strategy.
"Apple wasn't in the business of training their own models," he said. "So Apple wants as many breakthroughs to happen in the open-source space as possible because they can just run those on their phones and then deliver...intelligence to all their users without them having to have the kind of capital expenditures of the other companies."
Analysts say they are largely optimistic about Apple's prospects in the AI sector, but undecided on the exact impact Apple Intelligence will have on hardware sales.
William Kerwin, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar, said Apple was in a "good position to productize AI essentially by putting it on a device and into apps."
"We think it's a natural fit with them," he said. "We are a little bit less bullish on the impact it'll have on their actual hardware sales."
He said Apple's strong performance in comparison to a lot of hardware names in the wake of DeepSeek is "just a reflection that longer term, if there is this trend to smaller, more efficient models that require less hardware to get a similar performance — that goes well with Apple's strategy, because they're very much focused on smaller models that can go on device, run at the edge and be efficient."
Apple is still facing problems in China, however, which analysts say could affect overall smartphone sales.
"China is now a significant headwind to iPhone revenue growth, and it used to be a pretty significant tailwind," Kerwin said. "It was an emerging growth market. Now there are more ramped-up competitive options from Huawei or Xiaomi...We still think they'll be able to grow in China, but it's no longer that high-growth outlet."
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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