Matteo Wong
Earlier this week, almost overnight, the American tech industry entered a full-on panic. The latest version of DeepSeek, an AI model from a Chinese start-up of the same name, appeared to equal OpenAI’s most advanced program, o1. On Monday, DeepSeek overtook ChatGPT as the No. 1 free app on Apple’s mobile-app store in the United States.
So far, China has lagged the U.S. in the AI race. DeepSeek suggests that the country has gained significant ground: The chatbot was built more quickly and with less money than analogous models in the U.S., and also appears to use less computing power. Software developers using DeepSeek pay roughly 95 percent less per word than they do with OpenAI’s top model. One prominent AI executive wrote that DeepSeek was a “wake up call for America.” Because DeepSeek appears to be cheaper and more efficient than similarly capable American AI models, the tech industry’s enormous investments in computer chips and data centers have been thrown into doubt—so much that the top AI chipmaker, Nvidia, lost $600 billion in market value on Monday, the largest single-day drop in U.S. history. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said that it was “invigorating to have a new competitor” and that, in response, the company would move up some new software announcements. (Yesterday morning, OpenAI said that it is investigating whether DeepSeek used ChatGPT outputs to train its own model.)
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