DeepSeek: The Chinese AI Shaking Up the Tech World

This one Chinese app – DeepSeek AI single-handedly wiped $1 trillion from the US stock market, and sent shockwaves around the world. But just a couple of days ago, hardly anyone even knew its name. Today, however, it’s been called a “Sputnik” moment, referring to the day that Russia became the first country in the world to send a satellite into space and marking the beginning of the infamous space race.

So here’s why even Trump is calling this a wake-up call. You see, eight years ago, the Russian President Vladimir Putin said something that has become a commonly used phrase – “Whoever controls the future of AI, controls the world.”

And for years, experts have been saying that China is years behind America when it comes to artificial intelligence. And low-key, the US government kind of could take a little credit for that. Because three years ago, they banned Nvidia, the world’s leading AI chip maker, from selling to China.

And that was meant to ensure America’s global dominance of AI. You see, necessity breeds innovation. So this small, relatively unknown research lab in China was forced to rethink everything from the ground up.

And the result? They managed to create an AI model that is just as good, if not even better, than OpenAI’s most advanced model, and here’s the kicker, for 90% less of the cost. With the launch of its groundbreaking models DeepSeek-V3 and R1, the company has not only disrupted the AI market but also triggered a massive financial shake-up, particularly impacting the American semiconductor giant Nvidia.

OpenAI spends $5 billion a year, and it took $100 million just to train GPT-4, while the DeepSeek project cost $5.5 million.

That is so staggeringly cheap that a lot of people refuse to even believe it. So just a few days ago, some of the biggest US tech companies invested over $500 billion in just AI data centers. And then they see China creating this for less than $6 million?

Of course the US stock markets would crash. In fact, Nvidia lost close to $600 billion in market cap, becoming the biggest drop for any company in a single day in US history. Oh,… But DeepSeek, they did one more thing.

They not only dropped this AI for free, while OpenAI is charging $200 a month, but they also dropped it open source, meaning anyone anywhere can access the code, improve it, adapt this, and even use it to build their own AI models for free

And that is ironic because OpenAI is closed, while DeepSeek is now literally OpenAI. This caused so much disruption that after they shot to number one in the app store, they were forced to temporarily limit user registrations due to large-scale malicious attacks on their services.

And just like that, all of us, we just witnessed an inflection point where the race to create the world’s most advanced AI just got so serious. And that is scary.

Have you tried out the new DeepSeek AI –  https://chat.deepseek.com/ ?

You can find it both on Google play store and App store – completely free.