Companies and organizations like Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Google, or Anthropic have dominated AI news in the past year. This dominance is now challenged by Chinese AI startup DeepSeek and its large language models.

What is DeepSeek?

The AI startup was founded by Liang Wenfeng in 2023. It received funding from the Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, which was founded in 2015. Wenfeng is the co-founder of the hedge fund.

DeepSeek has developed several large language models, which it calls DeepSeek as well. The latest models are DeepSeek V3 and DeepSeek R1.

Why is DeepSeek in the news?

The startup claims that its latest large language model was developed in just two months at a cost of under $6 million. If true, development costs would be a fraction of the costs that current AI frontrunners have to pay to develop new models.

Additionally, DeepSeek V3, its latest large language model, has outperformed several models of US companies in publicly accessible benchmarks.

Chatbot Arena, a ranking website affiliated with UC Berkeley, has two DeepSeek models listed in the top ten. While ChatGPT and Gemini are placed above it in the leaderboard, competitors such as xAI's Grok or Anthropic's Claude have gone done in ranking as a consequence.

The startup's application for Apple devices has overtaken other AI apps in the productivity category on Apple's App Store. On Android, it has claimed a top 3 spot in the productivity category.

Why DeepSeek is challenging the dominance of US AI companies

DeepSeek's large language models appear to cost a lot less than other models. According to a research paper released last month, DeepSeek stated that it spend less than $6 million on the development of the V3 model.

Questions are now raised about the money that companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, or Google are spending on AI model development and data centers in comparison.

DeepSeek Limitations

While DeepSeek's AI model challenge models of competitors in most areas, it is facing other limitations than Western counterparts. One of these is that it ignores any topic that is critical of China according to reports.

DeepSeek requires an account, but the registration process seems to have technical problems at the time of writing. Attempts to sign-up using an email address are met with the "Sorry! We're having trouble sending you a verification code right now. Please try again later." error message.

Closing Words

The coming months will show whether DeepSeek is fueling another technical evolution in AI, one that could reduce the cost factor significantly and speed up development at the same time.

Have you tried DeepSeek already? What is your take on the AI models of the startup? Feel free to leave a comment down below.