🐳 "ChatGPT just lost its job to AI." How Did Chinese DeepSeek Blow Up the AI Industry?
Who created the free ChatGPT competitor, is DeepSeek's arrival changing the AI race, and what's next? Let's get into the main topic of the week.
➡️ DeepSeek was founded by entrepreneur Liang Wenfeng in May 2023. A few years before, Wenfeng co-founded High-Flyer, a hedge fund that uses AI for stock trading.
➡️ The company's first AI models were better and cheaper than the other Chinese ones. At the end of 2024, DeepSeek entered the international competition with the V3 model, which showed results at the level of GPT-4o and Claude-3.5 Sonnet. We covered the V3 in detail here.
➡️ Soon, on January 20, the reasoning DeepSeek-R1 was released. It is as good as OpenAI o1 in most benchmarks and superior in some. Also, R1's API access is much cheaper.
➡️ By January 27, the DeepSeek app became the most popular app on iOS and Android in the U.S., displacing ChatGPT. Big Tech's stocks dropped down.
➡️ Nvidia suffered the most. Its shares fell by about 17%, its capitalization — by almost $600 billion. This was the largest collapse in a day for a single company.
💲 How Much Did the DeepSeek Models Cost?
We don't know. The training of V3, which the R1 is based on, cost $5.6 million. This figure does not account for the expenses related to pre-launch activities or the compute cluster comprising 2,048 Nvidia H800 GPUs.
🔐 Security. Conspiracies. Censorship.
Wiz discovered, that a DeepSeek's database including some of chat logs was in the public domain. The backdoor was promptly covered up.
Elon Musk and Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang suspect that DeepSeek has more GPUs but the company is hiding the real numbers because of U.S. export restrictions. Microsoft is investigating information about DeepSeek may have abused the use of the OpenAI API in training its model. However, there is no evidence of any of this yet.
DeepSeek stores data in China, which has alarmed ordinary users and the U.S. authorities. The service is prone to censorship: DeepSeek's models often don't answer questions about China's domestic politics.
On the other hand, DeepSeek is an open model: anyone can deploy it locally and without restrictions. For example, Perplexity AI-powered web search had integrated R1: without censorship or sending prompts to China.
📌 You can use DeepSeek-R1 with Perplexity search in our bot!
1️⃣ Go to @GPT4AgentsBot and select the command /deepseek
2️⃣ Click 🔘 Activate button
50 uses per day is included in the "Premium Max" plan.
🔜 What's Next?
OpenAI is set to release its o3-mini soon, which will likely enhance the company's standing in the market.
The real question now isn't whether Chinese startups can create a competitor to the o3-mini or a major version of the o3, but rather how quickly they will do it.
So, whose AI is the best today?
❤️ — ChatGPT
🐳 — DeepSeek
🔥 — Other: Gemini, Claude…
