The rise of little-known Chinese tech start-up DeepSeek has exposed weaknesses in America’s “small yard, high fence” strategy to contain China’s technological progress, according to experts.
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The company’s success has also signalled an intensifying competition between the US and China to win over the brightest AI minds, they said, while noting that China may still have a long way to go to become a leading global AI player.
This week, DeepSeek, a research lab based in Hangzhou, topped the free download charts in app stores in both China and the US, even surpassing ChatGPT in the US rankings.
The platform also triggered alarm among investors in US tech companies about their dominance in AI, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq down a whopping 4 per cent and AI darling Nvidia dropping as much as 12 per cent in pre-market trading on Monday.
The firm, which mostly consists of fresh graduates from Chinese universities, stunned the tech world when it released its latest large language model (LLM) R1 on January 20 with performance that matched that of OpenAI’s o1 series of reasoning models.
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LLMs are large deep-learning models that are pre-trained on vast amounts of data and refer to the technology underpinning generative AI services such as ChatGPT.