DeepSeek said on Monday that it would temporarily restrict user logins “due to widespread malicious attacks” on its services, although existing users will be able to log in as usual.
The Chinese AI startup has generated a lot of buzz in recent weeks as a fast-growing competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and other leading AI tools.
Earlier Monday, DeepSeek took over rival OpenAI as the most downloaded free app in the US on appleApp Store, leading to ChatGPT canceling DeepSeek’s AI assistant. It helped inspire a major sell-off in global technology stocks.
The hype around the company, which was founded in 2023 and released its R1 prototype last week, has spread to technology analysts, investors and developers, who say the hype — and the ensuing fear of being left behind in the ever-changing AI hype cycle — may be justified. . Especially in the age of the AI arms race, where tech giants and startups alike are racing to ensure they are not left behind in the market. It is expected to reach $1 trillion in revenue over a decade.
DeepSeek reportedly spun out of a Chinese hedge fund’s AI research unit in April 2023 to focus on large-scale language models and access artificial general intelligence, or AGI — a branch of artificial intelligence that equals or exceeds human intelligence in a wide range of tasks, which is used by OpenAI and Its competitors say they are catching up quickly.
The buzz around DeepSeek in particular started building last week, when the startup launched R1, its inference model that rivals OpenAI’s O1. It’s open source, meaning any AI developer can use it, and it has reached the top of app stores and Industry leaderboardsUsers praised its performance and logical capabilities.
The startup’s models are remarkably built though the United States Limit chip exports To China three times in three years. Estimates vary on exactly how much the DeepSeek R1 costs, or how many GPUs went into it. Jefferies analysts estimated that the latest version had a “training cost of just $5.6 million (assuming a rental cost of $2 per 800 hours). This is less than 10% of the training cost.” deadflame.”
But regardless of the specific numbers, reports agree that the model was developed at a fraction of the cost of competing models by OpenAI, Anthropic, and OpenAI. Google And others.
As a result, the AI sector has become mired in questions, including whether the growing number of astronomical funding rounds and billion-dollar valuations are necessary — and whether the bubble is about to burst.
