CHINA’S cheap AI app DeepSeek has rocked the tech world by soaring past ChatGPT as the global race to superintelligence hots up.
DeepSeek surged to the top of Apple’s App Store in the UK, US and China after its launch on Trump’s inauguration day, challenging America’s crown as undisputed AI kings.
The blistering popularity has rattled tech experts and free-speech advocates, and was branded “AI’s Sputnik moment” by Donald Trump’s adviser Marc Andreessen.
The software is fitted with sinister features, such as its refusal to answer certain political questions about China and its leader Xi Jinping.
DeepSeek is a large language model that can generate human-like responses to prompts, just like the famous ChatGPT.
The app is powered by AI software called DeepSeek-V3, which its researchers claim was developed for less than $6million.
This is much less than the billions international competitors have spent on their own software, though the figure has been disputed by others in the industry.
The company boasted their app has “performance on par with” ChatGPT when it comes to maths, coding and writing responses.
Andreessen warned: “Deepseek R1 is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen.”
AI models are powered by advanced chips, and since 2021 the US government has restricted the sale of these to China in order to stunt progress.
To get around the supply problem, Chinese developers have been collaborating and experimenting with new approaches.
This process has led to models that require much less computing power than before and that can be produced far more cheaply.
Alexandr Wang, CEO of San Francisco-based Scale AI, said the breakthrough must be a “wake-up call for America”.
He bought a whole page advert in The Washington Post last week imploring the president to “win the AI war”.
Trump has already emphasised his ambition to secure America as the “world capital of artificial intelligence” during his inauguration speech and announced a $500billon “Stargate” AI investment last week.
The Chinese government has announced much less investment in AI funds – just $8.2billion, according to the South China Morning Post.
US analysts are disturbed by the Chinese’s advance after shares in American-based AI companies, such as Nvidia, Microsoft and Meta, dropped on Monday morning.
Vey-Sern, a technology adviser, told the BBC that DeepSeek could “potentially derail the investment case for the entire AI supply chain, which is driven by high spending from a small handful of hyper-scalers”.
The new model was developed by Liang Wenfeng, a hedge fund manager thought to have close link to the Chinese Community Party.
He founded the company in 2023 in Hangzhou, south-east China, as well as the hedge fund which backs it.
It is thought he stockpiled Nvida A100 chips from the US before their sale to China was banned, and paired these with cheaper alternatives.
DeepSeek is not the only Chinese AI company on the heels of the US.
Alibaba launched its own QwQ model in November and is making fast progress.
Companies including Huawei are working to produce Chinese-made chips so that the country is not reliant on the US supply.
What are large language models?
A LARGE language model is a type of artificial intelligence that uses machine learning to analyse text.
Huge quantities of text-based data, like books and articles, are fed into the software to teach it how language works.
When up and running, the models are able to generate relevant textual responses to prompts.
They can also summarise and translate passages of words.
The gold standard is for a LLM to produce “natural”, human-like responses to whatever is input.
Problems can arise with LLMs if they are fed incorrect information, which can cause inaccurate responses.
The most advanced LLMs are called generative pretrained transformers – which is what the acronym in ChatGPT stands for.
Modern LLMs emerged in 2017 and use transformer models with a very large number of parameters – the variable present in the model that affects its output.
OpenAI released its ChatGPT-4 in 2023, which was widely praised and massively raised the profile of LLMs.
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