The outages on Monday were the company’s longest in about 90 days and coincided with its skyrocketing popularity.

DeepSeek’s AI

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 caused a scramble among Chinese tech firms, who rushed to create their own chatbots powered by artificial intelligence.

The quality and cost efficiency of DeepSeek’s models have flipped this narrative on its head. The two models that have been showered with praise by Silicon Valley executives and US tech company engineers alike, DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1, are on par with OpenAI and Meta’s most advanced models, the Chinese startup has said.

Controversy over chips

The US administration of former president Joe Biden had since 2021 widened the scope of bans designed to stop these chips from being exported to China and used to train Chinese firms’ AI models.

Although this detail has since been disputed, the claim that the chips used were less powerful than the most advanced Nvidia products the US has sought to keep out of China, as well as the relatively cheap training costs, has prompted US tech executives to question the effectiveness of tech export controls.

What is DeepSeek?

Liang’s fund announced in March 2023 on its official WeChat account that it was “starting again”, going beyond trading to concentrate resources on creating a “new and independent research group, to explore the essence of AGI” (Artificial General Intelligence). DeepSeek was created later that year.

But some have publicly expressed scepticism about DeepSeek’s success story.

On Monday, analysts from Bernstein Research highlighted in a research note that DeepSeek’s total training costs for its V3 model were unknown but were much higher than what the startup claimed was used for computing power. The analysts also said the training costs of the equally-acclaimed R1 model were not disclosed.