Kelly Ng, Brandon Drenon, Tom Gerken and Marc Cieslak
BBC News
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DeepSeek has stunned the world – what do we know about it?
DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup, made headlines worldwide after it topped app download charts and caused US tech stocks to sink.
In January, it released its latest model, DeepSeek R1, which it said rivalled technology developed by ChatGPT-maker OpenAI in its capabilities, while costing far less to create.
Its popularity and potential rattled investors, wiping billions of dollars off the market value of chip giant Nvidia – and called into question whether American firms would dominate the booming artificial intelligence (AI) market, as many assumed they would.
President Donald Trump described it as a “wake-up call” for US companies.
What is artificial intelligence?
To understand why DeepSeek has made such a stir, it helps to start with AI and its capability to make a computer seem like a person.
A machine uses the technology to learn and solve problems, typically by being trained on massive amounts of information and recognising patterns.
The end result is software that can have conversations like a person or predict people’s shopping habits.
In recent years, it has become best known as the tech behind chatbots such as ChatGPT – and DeepSeek – also known as generative AI.
These programs again learn from huge swathes of data, including online text and images, to be able to make new content.
But these tools can also create falsehoods and often repeat the biases contained within their training data.
Millions of people use tools such as ChatGPT to help them with everyday tasks like writing emails, summarising text, and answering questions – and others even use them to help with basic coding and studying.
What is DeepSeek?
DeepSeek is the name of a free AI-powered chatbot, which looks, feels and works very much like ChatGPT.
That means it’s used for many of the same tasks, though exactly how well it works compared to its rivals is up for debate.
It is reportedly as powerful as OpenAI’s o1 model – released at the end of last year – in tasks including mathematics and coding.
Like o1, R1 is a “reasoning” model. These models produce responses incrementally, simulating how humans reason through problems or ideas.
Deepseek says it has been able to do this cheaply – researchers behind it claim it cost $6m (£4.8m) to train, a fraction of the “over $100m” alluded to by OpenAI boss Sam Altman when discussing GPT-4.
It has also seemingly be able to minimise the impact of US restrictions on the most powerful chips reaching China.
DeepSeek’s founder reportedly built up a store of Nvidia A100 chips, which have been banned from export to China sin
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