Athira Sethu
Kochi, 28 January 2025
DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, quickly gained top downloads for the free apps at Apple’s store after it launched in January 2025. It is raising much financial market volatility since its cost is much cheaper compared to those offered by US-based AI companies.
The famous Silicon Valley investor, Marc Andreessen, has described DeepSeek as one of the most impressive AI breakthroughs so far. DeepSeek claims to have an AI model similar in quality to the top US models, with one such being ChatGPT, but built at a fraction of their cost. DeepSeek spent only $6 million on building its app, while US AI companies spent billions.
DeepSeek was founded in July 2023 in Hangzhou, China, and its AI assistant app was launched in the US on January 10, 2025. The founder of the company, Liang Wenfeng, used funds from a hedge fund he started and a stockpile of Nvidia chips to create DeepSeek. He is estimated to own about 50,000 Nvidia A100 chips, which are now banned from being exported to China. This pack of chips allowed him to create DeepSeek by putting together these cheap available chips.
This app took a record place for free download at Apple’s App Store in the US. This is the most useful AI assistant similar to that of ChatGPT; the AI assists a person to question anything that will help with anything at hand. This is a widely lauded application which says makes one’s writings personal, however this application has an evasive take on sensitive topics-politics. For example, when asked about the 1989 Tiananmen Square events, it refused to answer, stating that it’s only designed to provide helpful and harmless information.
Low-cost DeepSeek is challenging the hegemony of US companies like Nvidia. This has brought financial turmoil, especially for Nvidia, whose stock value fell by 17%, eroding nearly $600 billion in market value on January 27, 2025. The success of DeepSeek shows that you don’t need the most expensive chips to create effective AI, which raises questions about the future need for high-end technology in AI development.
