China’s DeepSeek takes AI world by storm

BENGALURU: DeepSeek‘s dramatic impact on tech stocks worldwide on Monday was likely also the result of the huge interest it has generated among consumers. The Chinese artificial intelligence app has soared to the No. 1 spot in Apple’s App Store productivity category across major markets, overtaking ChatGPT.
Among DeepSeek’s rivals building large language models (LLMs), Perplexity founder & CEO Aravind Srinivas was the only one to make a public comment on the Chinese company’s accomplishment. He congratulated DeepSeek, and noted on X: “For a while, it wasn’t clear who would beat ChatGPT for the first time. The best we (Perplexity) could manage was #8, a year ago. Look forward to using all their (DeepSeek’s) models for search, assistant, and agents this year.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made an indirect reference to it. Speaking at the World Economic Forum, he said, “We should take the developments out of China very, very seriously.”
DeepSeek is founded by Liang Wenfeng, who previously founded a hedge fund. What makes its achievement noteworthy has been its ability to make a ChatGPT-class language model at a fraction of ChatGPT’s cost. DeepSeek’s R1 AI model is said to match or even beat the likes of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini on multiple parameters. What’s more, it’s free, unlike ChatGPT that has a very limited free version.
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the marquee venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and an adviser to US President Donald Trump, described DeepSeek’s accomplishment as “AI’s Sputnik moment,” making a reference to a period of anxiety among Western nations about a possible technological gap between the US and the Soviet Union when the latter launched the Sputnik satellite.