DeepSeek -- the Chinese AI that sparked a stock market panic
Today has seen millions of dollars wiped off US market tech stocks by the launch of DeepSeek, the latest Chinese AI that threatens US dominance in the sector.
This is partly because DeepSeek can run on much less powerful hardware than rivals such as OpenAI's o1. DeepSeek also says that its v3 model, released in December, cost less than $6 million to train, less than a tenth of what Meta spent on its most recent system.
Combine this with its use of under-powered Nvidia chips designed for the Chinese market and you can see why it's making waves. Particularly as this is likely an unintended consequence of US restricting the exports of high-end chips to China.
Clearly people want to try it out too, DeepSeek is currently topping the Apple AppStore downloads chart, ahead of ChatGPT.
Billionaire and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen describes the latest model as 'AI's Sputnik moment' in a post on X -- referring to the cold war crisis sparked by USSR's launch of a satellite ahead of the US.
Shares in Nvidia, the Dutch microchip equipment maker ASML, and power engineering company Siemens Energy, among others, have all seen sharp drops.
DeepSeek can be accessed on the web or downloaded as an app for iOS and Android. Be aware, however, that it's subject to Chinese state censorship. Ask it about sthe status of Taiwan or the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests for example and you'll get very different answers from those delivered by ChatGPT.
Censorship aside it works like pretty much any LLM and will happily perform everyday tasks like answering questions, writing code or offering recipe suggestions. There are clear parallels with TikTok -- briefly banned in the US, until it wasn't -- in terms of how much of a threat it presents to national security. No doubt governments are keeping a close watch.
Image credit: Mojahid_Mottakin/depositphotos.com