On Monday, a Chinese startup made a $1 Trillion hole in the US tech market. The stock market darling, Nvidia, lost more than $600 billion in a single day. The rise of Deepseek, China’s AI startup, rattled not only Nvidia but also other AI giants like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta.
The market crash came after Deepseek dethroned ChatGPT as the most downloaded app on Apple’s AppStore. While the stock market is panicking, AI users can’t be happier. One X user thanked Deepseek for proving that GenAI is a “giant scam” inflated by capitalists and is “actually worth less than $5.5 million.”
AI expert and author Gianluca Mauro also praised Deepseek, calling the Chinese models “amazing.” What makes Deepseek so much better than exciting AI models?
Is Deepseek Fulfilling the Promise ChatGPT Couldn’t?
OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Peter Theil with a promise to remain open and non-profit and to improve human society. Ten years later, the promise has been forgotten, and, as Elon Musk puts it, OpenAI is driven by speed and profit. In 2019, the company refused to release its GPT-2 model’s source code and shed its non-profit status for “capped” profit.
Deepseek, on the other hand, is completely open-source. Anyone can download the model and run it on their local system. This implies that users can not only build applications on top of the Deepseek model but also remove any type of censorship or skewed results.
Deepseek is Better and Cheaper Than Other Models
There are several categories, like technical tasks, coding, and maths, in which Deepseek outperforms other popular AI models. Javier Aguirre, an AI researcher at Samsung, posted on LinkedIn that Deepseek was able to solve a complex coding problem that the latest ChatGPT o1 model couldn’t. Also, keep in mind that the o1 model comes with a $20 monthly subscription fee, while Deepseek is completely free.
Deepseek API is also a boon for developers for its low cost and higher scalability. It only costs $0.28 for one million output tokens, while the OpenAI o1 model costs $60 for the same.
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