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The Chinese company DeepSeek sent out shockwaves last week, rocketing to the top of the App Store with the launch of its generative AI and chatbot. It offers consumers tools at a fraction of the cost of US competitors, leading to plummeting stocks and major market disruption.
The AI industry saw unprecedented upheaval last week with the release of DeepSeek, a Chinese-based chatbot and generative AI tool.
It works in a similar way to other similar US products but at the fraction of the cost of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic’s models. DeepSeek was top of the App Store after its first weekend live and caused nearly $600 billion in market value losses.
It’s the biggest drop in the history of the UK stock market.
The bot itself works in a very similar way to its competitors. Users have noted that it has a similar tendency for misinformation and ‘hallucinations,’ though its generative output quality seems on par and up to industry standard.
DeepSeek says that its model was trained on data leading up to October 2023 and is just as rapid with its response times. It is free to use and open source.
Until now, most of the advances in generative AI and large language models (LLMs) came from Silicon Valley and US tech giants. The narrative surrounding its capabilities, usefulness and reliability was largely controlled and maintained by industry leaders.
This helped to prop up the value of tech companies and ensure that AI remained enticing to investors.
As The Guardian points out, there has been an element of mystique to generative AI thus far.
Consumers have been taken aback by the possibilities of image generation, Chat GPT scriptwriting and everything in between over the past few years. All of these promises and marvels have meant that nearly every new startup or investor deck proposal must mention AI tools in order to keep up with industry interests.
Everything must use AI now – even if sometimes it makes little sense.
