Released on 10 January 2025 DeepSeek-R1 surpassed ChatGPT as the most downloaded freeware app on the iOS App Store in the United States by 27 January.[1][2] DeepSeek's success against larger and more established rivals has been described as "upending AI"[2] and initiating "a global AI space race".[3] DeepSeek's compliance with Chinese government censorship policies and its data collection practices have also raised concerns over privacy and information control in the model, prompting regulatory scrutiny in multiple countries.
History
On 10 January 2025, DeepSeek released the chatbot, based on the DeepSeek-R1 model, for iOS and Android. By 27 January, DeepSeek-R1 surpassed ChatGPT as the most-downloaded freeware app on the iOS App Store in the United States,[2] which resulted in an 18% drop in Nvidia’s share price.[4][5] After a "large-scale" cyberattack on the same day disrupted the proper functioning of its servers, DeepSeek limited its new user registration to phone numbers from mainland China, email addresses, or Google account logins, [6][7]
Usage
DeepSeek can answer questions, solve logic problems, and write computer programs on par with other chatbots, according to benchmark tests used by American AI companies.[2]
Operation
DeepSeek-V3 uses significantly fewer resources compared to its peers. For example, whereas the world's leading AI companies train their chatbots with supercomputers using as many as 16,000 graphics processing units (GPUs), DeepSeek claims to have needed only about 2,000 GPUs—namely, the H800 series chips from Nvidia.[8] It was trained in around 55 days at a cost of US$5.58 million,[8] which is roughly one-tenth of what tech giant Meta spent building its latest AI technology.[2]
Reactions
DeepSeek's success against larger and more established rivals has been described as "upending AI",[2] constituting "the first shot at what is emerging as a global AI space race",[3] and ushering in "a new era of AI brinkmanship".[9]
Challenge to US AI dominance
DeepSeek's competitive performance at relatively minimal cost has been recognized as potentially challenging the global dominance of American AI models.[10] Various publications and news media, such as The Hill and The Guardian, have described the release of the R1 chatbot as a "Sputnik moment" for American AI,[11][12][13] echoing Marc Andreessen's view.
Chinese respect
DeepSeek's founder Liang Wenfeng has been compared to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, with CNN calling him the Sam Altman of China and an evangelist for AI.[14] Chinese state media widely praised DeepSeek as a national asset.[15][16] On 20 January 2025, China's Premier Li Qiang invited Wenfeng to his symposium with experts and asked him to provide opinions and suggestions on a draft for comments of the annual 2024 government work report.[17]
Performance and success
Leading figures in the American AI sector had mixed reactions to DeepSeek's performance and success.[18] Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Altman—whose companies are involved in the United States government-backed "Stargate Project" to develop American AI infrastructure—both called DeepSeek "super impressive".[19][20] Various companies including Amazon Web Services, Toyota, and Stripe are seeking to use the model in their program.[21] When American President Donald Trump announced The Stargate Project, he referred to DeepSeek as a wake-up call[22] and a positive development.[23][12][13][24]
DeepSeek's optimization of limited resources has highlighted potential limits of United States sanctions on China's AI development, including export restrictions on advanced AI chips to China.[27][28] The success of the company's AI models consequently "sparked market turmoil"[29] and caused shares in major global technology companies to plunge on 27 January 2025: Nvidia's stock fell by as much as 17–18%,[30] as did the stock of rival Broadcom. Other tech firms also sank, including Microsoft (down 2.5%), Google's owner Alphabet (down over 4%), and Dutch chip equipment maker ASML (down over 7%).[13] A global sell-off of technology stocks on Nasdaq, prompted by the release of the R1 model, led to record losses of about $593billion in the market capitalizations of AI and computer hardware companies;[31] and by the next day a total of $1 trillion of value was wiped from American stocks.[12]
The login error given by DeepSeek on 28 January 2025 following a cyberattack.
Concerns
Distillation
DeepSeek has been reported to sometimes claim that it is ChatGPT.[32][33] OpenAI said that DeepSeek may have "inappropriately" used outputs from its model as training data in a process called distillation.[34] However, there is currently no method to prove this conclusively.[35]
DeepSeek's compliance with Chinese government censorship policies and its data collection practices have raised concerns over privacy and information control in the model, prompting regulatory scrutiny in multiple countries.
Reports indicate that it applies content moderation in accordance with local regulations, limiting responses on topics such as the Tiananmen Square massacre and Taiwan's political status.[36][37] DeepSeek models that have been uncensored also display bias towards Chinese government viewpoints on controversial topics such as Xi Jinping's human rights record and Taiwan's political status.[38][39] However, users who have downloaded the models and hosted them on their own devices and servers have reported successfully removing this censorship.[40][41]
Asked if Xi Jinping is an autocrat, DeepSeek apologises that this question is "beyond my current scope". The same question posed about Narendra Modi returns a "balanced analysis" of viewpoints.
"Sorry, that's beyond my current scope. Let's talk about something else."
The integrated censorship mechanisms and restrictions can only be removed to a limited extent in the open-source version of the R1 model.[45] If the "core Socialist values" defined by the Chinese Internet regulatory authorities are touched on, or the political status of Taiwan is raised, discussions are terminated.[46] Locally hosted instances of R1 are still reported to provide answers consistent with Chinese Communist Partypropaganda narratives.[45] When tested by NBC News, for instance, DeepSeek's R1 described Taiwan as "an inalienable part of China's territory", and stated:[47]
"We firmly oppose any form of 'Taiwan independence' separatist activities and are committed to achieving the complete reunification of the motherland through peaceful means."
In January 2025, however, Western researchers were able to trick DeepSeek into giving certain answers to some of these topics by requesting in its answer to swap certain letters for similar-looking numbers.[44]
Perplexity AI, Inc. has post-trained R1 on a censorship dataset containing 40,000 multilingual prompts on the Chinese Communist Party using an adapted version of Nvidia's NeMo 2.0 namely into a fully ″uncensored″ model for ″unbiased, accurate, and factual″ responses to sensitive topics. They also released the model on Sonar Pro API and Hugging Face including the weights under open source license terms.[48] The dataset has not been released (yet).[citation needed]
Many experts fear that the government of China could use the AI system for foreign influence operations, spreading disinformation, surveillance, and the development of cyberweapons.[49][50][51] An article in Wired commented that the DeepSeek online service sending data to its home country might set "the stage for greater scrutiny".[52]
In February 2025, South Korea's data protection regulator, the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC), raised concerns over DeepSeek, confirming that it sent the nation's user data to the owner of TikTok (ByteDance) in China. Accordingly, the PIPC banned new downloads of the app until DeepSeek addressed these concerns. The company's representative in Korea has partially acknowledged its shortcomings in complying with local data protection laws.[53][54]
Miscellaneous
The Wall Street Journal reported that the DeepSeek app produces instructions for self-harm and dangerous activities more often than its American competitors.[55] Security researchers have found that DeepSeek sends data to a cloud platform affiliated with ByteDance.[56][57]
In February 2025, sources claimed that DeepSeek began considering raising external funding for the first time, with Alibaba and Chinese state funds expressing interest in investing in DeepSeek.[58][59] On February 21, DeepSeek announced plans to release key codes and data to the public starting the following week.[60][61]
Restrictions
Many countries have raised concerns about data security and DeepSeek's use of personal data. On 28 January 2025, the Italian data protection authority announced that it is seeking additional information on DeepSeek's collection and use of personal data.[62] On the same day, the United States National Security Council announced that it had started a national security review of DeepSeek,[63] and the United States Navy instructed all its members not to use DeepSeek due to "security and ethical concerns".[64]
Three days later, South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission opened an inquiry into DeepSeek's use of personal information[65]; the Dutch Data Protection Authority launched an investigation of Deep Seek[66]; Taiwan's digital ministry advised its government departments against using the DeepSeek service to "prevent information security risks"[65]; and Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a state ban on government-issued devices for DeepSeek, along with Xiaohongshu and Lemon8.[67]
In February 2025, access to DeepSeek was banned on the New South Wales Department of Customer Service's devices.[68] That same month, Australia, South Korea, and Canada banned DeepSeek from government devices[69][70][71] and South Korea suspended new downloads of DeepSeek due to risks of personal information misuse.[72]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
