What to Know About China’s DeepSeek AI

DeepSeek has Silicon Valley in awe and stocks in a frenzy.

Tech stocks sank in a broad selloff Monday after the Chinese artificial-intelligence upstart said it had trained high-performing AI models cheaply, without the most advanced chips. Nvidia closed down 17%, losing $589 billion of market value in a single day. That’s the biggest daily decline in dollars ever for a publicly listed company.

DeepSeek later said it was the victim of “large-scale malicious attacks” on its services and was temporarily limiting new registration.

Here’s what you need to know about DeepSeek:
What is DeepSeek and why am I hearing about it now?

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company, which just a week ago launched its latest AI model, which it calls R1. The company said the model was particularly good at problem solving, performing on par with OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model—but at a fraction of the cost per use. A DeepSeek app is currently top in iPhone download rankings for the U.S.