Until recently, DeepSeek was a virtually unknown Chinese company. However, this week it shook the markets and worried tech giants like Meta and Nvidia.
On Monday, stock markets in the United States dropped more than 2%, while in Europe and Japan, tech company shares also fell. The reason? DeepSeek achieved an artificial intelligence (AI) breakthrough that challenges one of the sector’s strongest beliefs.
Why has DeepSeek made such an impact?
Until now, it was believed that creating the best AI models required investing huge amounts of money in chips (semiconductors). But DeepSeek proved that this is not entirely true. It managed to match the capabilities of some popular chatbots using far fewer resources.
This discovery called into question the strategy of major tech companies, which have spent billions on AI. The news was so shocking that, according to Cade Metz, a reporter for The New York Times, it led many to ask:
Are U.S. companies still competitive in AI?
OpenAI’s reaction and suspicions about DeepSeek
DeepSeek’s breakthrough has not been without controversy. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced that it is investigating whether DeepSeek improperly used its data.
An OpenAI spokesperson stated: “We take aggressive measures to protect our technology and will continue working with the U.S. government to safeguard our AI models.”
The debate over data usage in AI
Interestingly, OpenAI is also facing accusations of unauthorized data usage. Several companies have sued OpenAI, claiming that it trained its models using copyrighted information without permission.
Among these lawsuits is one filed by The New York Times, which also involves Microsoft. This highlights a larger issue in the AI world: to what extent is it legal to use third-party data to train these models?
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