Click in to Chinese tech tsunami

DeepSeek — a Chinese AI startup — has sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley and the US where AI innovation & investment have dominated for years by successfully creating a model that rivals OpenAI

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Chinese Artificial Intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek has sent shockwaves through the tech community, with the release of extremely efficient AI models that can compete with cutting-edge products from US companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

Founded in 2023, DeepSeek has achieved its results with a fraction of the cash and computing power of its competitors.

There are reasons to believe that DeepSeek's creator, a Chinese company by the same name, has exaggerated its thriftiness — more on that shortly — but ignoring the global freak-out it has triggered would be a mistake.

DeepSeek rocketed to number one in app stores on the weekend and wiped more than half a trillion US dollars off the world's largest company and leading AI chip supplier, Nvidia, in very recent trading.

It was a public routing of the world's hitherto unshakable confidence in Silicon Valley's best labs, which have always insisted that the only path to a shining AI future is paved with as many expensive computer chips as possible.

DeepSeek now appears to have debunked one of the tech world's holiest scriptures, achieving similar success with far fewer and far older chips.

It could possibly mark the end of US dominance of the AI race, according to experts.

Some (though not all) of DeepSeek's code and technical explanation is open source, meaning it can be viewed, downloaded and used by anyone.

DeepSeek's "reasoning" R1 model, released last week, provoked excitement among researchers, shock among investors, and responses from AI heavyweights.

The company followed up on January 28 with a model that can work with images as well as text.

In December, DeepSeek released its V3 model. This is a very powerful "standard" large language model that performs at a similar level to OpenAI's GPT-4.0 and Anthropic's Claude 3.5.