DeepSeek on Monday said it would temporarily limit user registrations “due to large-scale malicious attacks” on its services, though existing users will be able to log in as usual.
The Chinese artificial intelligence startup has generated a lot of buzz in recent weeks as a fast-growing rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and other leading AI tools.
Earlier on Monday, DeepSeek took over rival OpenAI’s coveted spot as the most-downloaded free app in the U.S. on Apple’s App Store, dethroning ChatGPT for DeepSeek’s own AI Assistant. It helped inspire a significant selloff in global tech stocks.
Buzz about the company, which was founded in 2023 and released its R1 model last week, has spread to tech analysts, investors and developers, who say that the hype — and ensuing fear of falling behind in the ever-changing AI hype cycle — may be warranted. Especially in the era of the generative AI arms race, where tech giants and startups alike are racing to ensure they don’t fall behind in a market predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.
DeepSeek reportedly grew out of a Chinese hedge fund’s AI research unit in April 2023 to focus on large language models and reaching artificial general intelligence, or AGI — a branch of AI that equals or surpasses human intellect on a wide range of tasks, which OpenAI and its rivals say they’re fast pursuing.
The buzz around DeepSeek especially began to spread last week, when the startup released R1, its reasoning model that rivals OpenAI’s o1. It’s open-source, meaning that any AI developer can use it, and has rocketed to the top of app stores and industry leaderboards, with users praising its performance and reasoning capabilities.
The startup’s models were notably built despite the U.S. curbing chip exports to China three times in three years. Estimates differ on exactly how much DeepSeek’s R1 costs, or how many GPUs went into it. Jefferies analysts estimated that a recent version had a “training cost of only US$5.6m (assuming US$2/H800 hour rental cost). That is less than 10% of the cost of Meta’s Llama.”
But regardless of the specific numbers, reports agree that the model was developed at a fraction of the cost of rival models by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others.
As a result, the AI sector is awash with questions, including whether the industry’s increasing number of astronomical funding rounds and billion-dollar valuations is necessary — and whether a bubble is about to burst.