AI assistant created by Chinese startup Deepseek It became the number one most downloaded app in Apple’s App Store over the weekend, sending shockwaves through Silicon Valley and causing the price of major tech stocks to plummet. Nvidia saw more than $460 billion Wiping out Monday’s market capitalization, it was a drop Bloomberg characterized as “the largest in U.S. stock market history.”
The discontinuation stems from an open source model developed by Deepseek called R1, which debuted earlier this month. The company said it competes with the current industry leader: Openai’s 01. But what stunned the tech industry was that Debsic claimed to have built his model using only a small fraction of the specialized computer chips that AI companies typically need to develop sophisticated systems.
On Monday, Debsic A message on its website saying it was temporarily limiting new registrations due to “large-scale malicious attacks” on the company’s services.
Deepseek’s R1 model “challenges the idea that Western AI companies hold a significant lead over Chinese companies,” Jack Clark, founder of AI Startup Anthropic, said. books In his newsletter. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen Named It’s the “Sputnik moment of artificial intelligence.”
Cheng Lu, a research scientist at Openai, said that Deepseek’s chatbot demonstrated impressive Chinese conversational skills. “It’s the first time I feel the beauty of the Chinese language created by a chatbot,” he said. In post X Sunday.
Deepseek’s AI assistant is currently available for free and comes with three main functions. First, users can ask the chatbot questions and receive live answers. For example, when Wired asked for recipe ideas that included pomegranate seeds, Deepseek’s chatbot quickly provided 15 options ranging from yogurt to “Middle Eastern-inspired” rice, but did not cite any specific chefs or recipes.
Deepseek also has a search mode that searches for answers from the internet. When Wired asked, “What are some important news stories today?” Deepseek’s chatbot cited the ceasefire in Israel and linked to several Western news outlets such as BBC News, but not all stories are relevant to the topic. Ironically, one of them was a New York Times story about DeBseq’s impact on the stock market.
Finally, there’s a “DeepThink” mode that lets users take advantage of DeepSeek’s R1 model, which is built into Model V3. The difference between the two is that R1 has what are called “reasoning” abilities that allow him to explain step by step how he arrived at his conclusions. For example, when asked, “What are the most important historical events of the twentieth century?” Deepseek initially provided a long, winding answer that began with a number of broad questions.
“This is a hundred years, so a lot has happened,” read part of her response. “Maybe I should break it down by decades or major themes like wars, political changes, technological advances, social movements, etc.” Deepseek’s chatbot then went on to cite World War II, the Cold War, and the Holocaust.
But before R1 could finish her response, the entire answer disappeared and was replaced by a message that read, “Sorry, I’m not sure how to approach this type of question yet. Let’s talk about math, coding, and logic problems instead!” A number of experts and early adopters Notice It appears that Deepseek, just like other tech platforms operating in China Widespread censorship Topics that the Chinese Communist Party considers sensitive
But despite these limitations, Deepseek’s free chatbot could pose a serious threat to competitors like Openai, which charges $20 a month for access to its most powerful AI models. Unlike its Chinese counterpart, Openai does not disclose the underlying “weights” of its models, which determine how the AI processes information. She also refused to publicly declare “complete”Chains of thought“Produced by their own thought models.
