What is DeepSeek?
DeepSeek, officially known as Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Fundamental Technology Research Co., Ltd., was established on July 17, 2023. It is an innovative technology company focused on developing advanced large language models (LLM) and related technologies.
In Silicon Valley, DeepSeek has long been referred to as "the mysterious force from the East" and is one of the hotly discussed "Hangzhou Six Little Dragons" online.
By the end of 2024, DeepSeek released its new generation large language model V3 and announced it would be open source. Test results showed that its performance exceeded some mainstream open-source models and also had a cost advantage.
Subsequently, on the opening day of the World Economic Forum 2025 Annual Meeting, the Chinese company DeepSeek released its latest open-source model R1, once again attracting global attention in the field of artificial intelligence.
According to the company, the R1 model achieved significant breakthroughs technically—using purely deep learning methods to enable AI to spontaneously emerge reasoning abilities, performing on par with the official version of OpenAI's o1 model in tasks such as mathematics, coding, and natural language reasoning, while continuing the company's advantage of high cost-effectiveness.
It is understood that the training cost of the DeepSeek Company's R1 model was only $5.6 million, far lower than the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars invested by American tech giants like OpenAI, Google, and "Meta" in artificial intelligence technology.
Market analysts believe that the launch of the model by the Chinese company DeepSeek is like a "shock bomb," causing the market to question the competitiveness of the American tech industry. It leads investors to doubt the leading advantage, investment scale, and whether these expenditures will bring profits of American companies, thus causing artificial intelligence-themed stocks to be sold off.
Anneck Financial Company Chief Economist Jacobson: I think what really surprises people is companies like NVIDIA, which are considered to almost monopolize all chips in the AI ecosystem or around this field, have a very, very strong "moat." However, perhaps the "moat" is not as strong as people think, which might be the reason for their stock price decline, although I think it's still too early to conclude.
Currently, the mobile application developed by DeepSeek has surpassed ChatGPT, topping the US free app chart in the Apple App Store.
