DeepSeek: The New Chat Bot

A new Chinese company, founded in Hangzhou, Zhejiang and mainly known as DeepSeek, recently launched a free chatbot app for download for iOS and Android on January 20, 2025. Only a week after its release, the app already surpassed ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app. The company claims they only spent about 6 million dollars for training DeepSeek, unlike most other large language models such as GPT-4, which cost 100 million, and Llama 3.1, which required 10 times more computing power.

DeepSeek has faced a lot of malicious attacks due to its lack of cybersecurity measures and security vulnerabilities. There are also concerns about government access and privacy, since DeepSeek stores chats, prompts, and audio inputs in Chinese servers (according to their Terms of Service), so some governments decided to warn or place restrictions on it.

DeepSeek has also caused a noticeable impact on the stock market, causing Nvidia to lose almost 600 billion dollars in market capitalization in a single day due to the unfathomably low cost of training and its breakthroughs. Nvidia was not the only technology company to lose stock, as Oracle and Broadcom also lost billions of dollars to DeepSeek.

In accordance with China’s censorship, DeepSeek also refuses to give responses related to certain topics, and sometimes, the bot might start to generate the response, but censor it in the end. For example, when asking DeepSeek about Xi Jinping, Taiwan’s status, and Tiananmen Square, the bot will respond with how your question was beyond its scope. Still, there are some ways to bypass the censorship, such as using emojis or telling it to substitute certain characters, making DeepSeek say things it normally should not be able to say. 

Many American AIs were challenged by DeepSeek for its low cost and high performance, only needing about 2000 GPUs to train, compared to the 16000 GPUs the leading companies had to use. The founder, Liang Wenfang, was even called the “Sam Altman of China” by CNN due to his impressive feats. Some companies, like Amazon Web Services and Stripe, even plan on using DeepSeek in its services due to its cost. In summary, DeepSeek has made significant breakthroughs in the field of Artificial Intelligence and has gained the attention of many people like the president of China, Xi Jinping, and Donald Trump.