China made a new AI Chatbot named DeepSeek which skyrocketed to number one in rankings on the free charts of the Apple App Store in various countries, with the U.S. included, and this raises concerns about the leadership Silicon Valley is regarded in the development of AI. The app gained popularity just a week after its release due to its capacity to rival and even surpass famous AI such as ChatGPT’s performance whilst incurring merely a fraction of the costs for development.
DeepSeek did not raise funds externally nor has it made any big moves to monetize the model which can rival GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet from Anthropic. Liang Wenfeng, hedge fund manager, says the company used $5.6 million and the 2,048 of the Nvidia H800 to develop the R1 model, training it with a massive 671 billion parameters despite limited resources. The app has since received major success and is already affecting financial markets.
