DeepSeek is shaking up the AI industry with cost-efficient large-language models it claims can perform just as well as rivals from giants like OpenAI and Meta. The Chinese startup says its flagship R1 reasoning model is capable of achieving “performance comparable” to OpenAI’s o1 equivalent, while the newly-released Janus Pro multimodal AI model can supposedly outperform Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 3.
DeepSeek’s ChatGPT competitor quickly soared to the top of the App Store, and the company is disrupting financial markets, with shares of Nvidia dipping 17 percent to cut nearly $600 billion from its market cap on January 27th, which CNBC said is the biggest single-day drop in US history.
. The AI assistant is powered by the startup’s “state-of-the-art” DeepSeek-V3 model, allowing users to ask questions, plan trips, generate text, and more. As downloads of DeepSeek’s app spiked, the startup began restricting signups due to “malicious attacks.”
Launched in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek has garnered attention for building open-source AI models using less cash and fewer GPUs when compared to the billions spent by OpenAI, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others. If DeepSeek’s performance claims are true, it could prove that the startup managed to build powerful AI models despite strict US export controls preventing chipmakers like Nvidia from selling high-performance graphics cards in China.
Here’s all the latest on DeepSeek.
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on DeepSeek R1: “an impressive model.”The ChatGPT boss says of his company, “we will obviously deliver much better models and also it’s legit invigorating to have a new competitor,” then, naturally, turns the conversation to AGI.
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Without going into detail about what might happen to the $52 billion in subsidies from the CHIPS Act under his administration, Donald Trump said tariffs on foreign computer chips, semiconductors, and pharmaceuticals are coming “in the near future.” He also namechecked DeepSeek’s AI releases, saying, “…coming up with a faster method of AI and less expensive, that’s good. I view that as a positive if it is fact and it is true, and nobody knows, but I view that as a positive.”
In the speech at the House GOP Issues Conference held at the Trump National Doral Resort in Miami Monday afternoon, he said that to return the production of these goods to the US, “we don’t want to give them billions of dollars like this ridiculous program Biden has.” Instead the incentive for manufacturers will be “they will not want to pay a tax.”
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Nvidia’s market cap drops by almost $600 billion amid DeepSeek R1 hype.
As Chinese AI startup DeepSeek draws attention for open-source AI models that it says are cheaper than the competition while providing similar or better performance, AI chip king Nvidia’s stock price dropped today.
CNBC said that after closing at $118.58, down 17 percent, this was “the biggest drop ever for a U.S. company.”
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Nvidia responds to the DeepSeek hype.In a statement to Bloomberg, an Nvidia spokesperson said DeepSeek is an “excellent AI advancement” and shows how a company can create new AI models using the test-time scaling method, while “leveraging widely-available models and compute that is fully export control compliant.”
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DeepSeek says its newest AI model, Janus-Pro can outperform Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 3.
Input image analysis is limited to 384×384 resolution, but the company says the largest version, Janus-Pro-7b, beat comparable models on two AI benchmark tests.
Correction: As TechCrunch notes, Janus-Pro image input is listed as limited to low resolution, not its output.
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After surging to the top of Apple’s App Store charts in the US, DeepSeek’s AI Assistant is now restricting new user sign-ups. According to an incident report page, registrations are being temporarily limited “due to large-scale malicious attacks on DeepSeek’s services,” though it’s unclear how these limitations are being applied.
“Existing users can log in as usual,” DeepSeek said in its update. “Thanks for your understanding and support.” An alert banner on the DeepSeek web sign-up page says that “registration may be busy,” rather than entirely restricted, however, and encourages users to wait and “try again” if their application is unsuccessful.
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A chatbot made by Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek has rocketed to the top of Apple’s App Store charts in the US this week, dethroning OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app. The eponymous AI assistant is powered by DeepSeek’s open-source models, which the company says can be trained at a fraction of the cost using far fewer chips than the world’s leading models. The claim has riled financial markets, with Nvidia’s share price dropping over 12 percent in pre-market trading.
Downloads for the app exploded shortly after DeepSeek released its new R1 reasoning model on January 20th, which is designed for solving complex problems and reportedly performs as well as OpenAI’s o1 on certain benchmarks.