An AI-powered chatbot by the Chinese company DeepSeek has quickly become the most downloaded free app on Apple’s store, following its January release in the US.
The app’s sudden popularity, as well as DeepSeek’s reportedly low costs compared to those of US-based AI companies, have thrown financial markets into a spin.
Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has hailed DeepSeek as “one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs” in AI.
The company says its latest AI models are on par with industry-leading models in the US – like ChatGPT – at a fraction of the cost.
Researchers behind the app have said it only took $6m (£4.8m) to build it, much less than the billions spent by AI companies in the US.
What is DeepSeek?
DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company founded in Hangzhou, a city in southeastern China.
The company was launched in July 2023, but its popular AI assistant app was not released in the US until 10 January, according to Sensor Tower.
Who is Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek’s founder?
Liang Wenfeng partly funded DeepSeek using money from a hedge fund that he also launched.
The 40-year-old, an information and electronic engineering graduate, reportedly built up a store of Nvidia A100 chips, now banned from export to China.
Experts believe this collection – which some estimates put at 50,000 – led him to launch DeepSeek, by pairing these chips with cheaper, lower-end ones that are still available to import.
Mr Liang was recently seen at a meeting between industry experts and the Chinese premier Li Qiang.
