LOS ANGELES (AP) — Chinese tech startup DeepSeek said it was hit by a cyberattack on Monday that disrupted users' ability to register on the site.
The company, whose artificial intelligence chatbot has sent the tech world into a frenzy, said that it had suffered “large-scale malicious attacks” on its services. Registered users could log in normally, DeepSeek said.
DeepSeek began attracting more attention in the AI industry last month when it released a new AI model that it boasted was on par with similar models from U.S. companies such as ChatGPT maker OpenAI, and was more cost-effective in its use of expensive Nvidia chips to train the system on huge troves of data. The chatbot became more widely accessible when it appeared on Apple and Google app stores early this year.
By Monday, DeepSeek’s AI assistant had become the No. 1 downloaded free app on Apple’s iPhone store. The jump in popularity fueled debates over competition between the U.S. and China in developing AI technology. But some U.S. tech industry observers said they were worried about the idea that the Chinese startup has caught up with the American companies at the forefront of generative AI at a fraction of the cost.
What is DeepSeek?
The startup DeepSeek was founded in 2023 in Hangzhou, China and released its first AI large language model later that year. Its CEO Liang Wenfeng previously co-founded one of China's top hedge funds, High-Flyer, which focuses on AI-driven quantitative trading. The fund, by 2022, had amassed a cluster of 10,000 of California-based Nvidia's high-performance A100 graphics processor chips that are used to build and run AI systems, according to a post that summer on Chinese social media platform WeChat. The U.S. soon after restricted sales of those chips to China.
DeepSeek has said its recent models were built with Nvidia's lower-performing H800 chips, which are not banned in China, sending a message that the fanciest hardware might not be needed for cutting-edge AI research.
DeepSeek began attracting more attention in the AI industry last month when it released a new AI model that it boasted was on par with similar models from U.S. companies such as ChatGPT maker OpenAI, and was more cost-effective in its use of expensive Nvidia chips to train the system on troves of data. The chatbot became more widely accessible when it appeared on Apple and Google app stores early this year.
But it was a follow-up research paper published last week — on the same day as President Donald Trump's inauguration — that set in motion the panic that followed. That paper was about another DeepSeek AI model called R1 that showed advanced "reasoning" skills — such as the ability to rethink its approach to a math problem — and was significantly cheaper than a similar model sold by OpenAI called o1.
"What their economics look like, I have no idea," Rasgon said. "But I think the price points freaked people out."
What makes DeepSeek different?
One thing that distinguishes DeepSeek from competitors such as OpenAI is that its models are "open source" — meaning key components are free for anyone to access and modify, though the company hasn't disclosed the data it used for training.
But what's attracted the most admiration about DeepSeek's R1 model is what Nvidia calls a "perfect example of Test Time Scaling" — or when AI models effectively show their train of thought, and then use that for further training without having to feed them new sources of data.
"It's just thinking out loud, basically," said Lennart Heim, a researcher at Rand Corp.
OpenAI's reasoning models, starting with o1, do the same, and it's likely that other U.S.-based competitors such as Anthropic and Google have similar capabilities that haven't been released, Heim said.
But "it's the first time that we see a Chinese company being that close within a relatively short time period. I think that's why a lot of people pay attention to it," Heim said. "I used to believe OpenAI was the leader, the king of the hill, and that nobody could catch up. Turns out this is not completely the case."