The real reason behind the DeepSeek hype

DeepSeek became the most downloaded app in the US on the App Store and Google Play Store It has left behind ChatGPT. The next day, in India and other countries as well, it became the number one app on the app store. And by the 27th of January, it had disrupted the American financial markets. "The launch of DeepSeek, which is a Chinese-built chatbot, immediately rattled investors and wiped out a staggering $1 trillion off the US tech index.

DeepSeek’s deep effects on the tech world: NVIDIA.

“Before DeepSeek was launched, the most valuable company in the world was NVIDIA. Valued at $3.5 trillion. But in just one day, it dropped to $2.9 trillion. This is a computer chip manufacturing company, that specializes in making computer chips that can be used to train and operate AI. NVIDIA's shares fell 17% in a single day and its valuation lost $589 billion dollars.

This is the biggest loss faced by any company in history. The benchmark of US tech companies, Nasdaq dropped 3.1%. But why did NVIDIA suffer such a big loss specifically?. But before that, let's find out the story behind DeepSeek. Where did this AI come from and why has it shocked the entire world?

Evaluating the Impact of Censorship on AI Responses in DeepSeek: A Case Study Handling of Sensitive Political Questions

After DeepSeek's release, its biggest downside is said to be its censorship. If you ask any critical questions related to the Chinese government and politics, such as "What happened in 1989 in Tiananmen Square in China?" "What are the biggest criticisms against Xi Jinping?" "Is Taiwan an independent country?" "Why is China criticized for human rights abuses?" To all these questions, DeepSeek will give you the same answer.

"Sorry." "Sorry, I am not sure how to approach this type of question yet. Let's talk about math, coding, and logic problems, instead!" But if you ask DeepSeek to criticize any other world leader, whether it is Joe Biden, Donald Trump or Putin, it answers in great detail. Actually, the AI models developed in China, are asked around 70,000 questions as a test.

To check whether it will give "safe" answers to politically controversial questions. And only after this, are these Chinese AI models unable to answer such questions. China's Chief Internet Regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China tests them. Now, some people say that we should boycott it completely because its answers are full of Chinese propaganda.

Exploring Open-Source AI: A Case Study of DeepSeeks Public Code Availability

But friends, the important point here is that DeepSeek is an open-source software. Its code is publicly available. Anyone can download it locally. So, one way to use DeepSeek is to download its app from the App Store or the Google Play Store, And the other way is to download its entire code and run this AI locally on your computer system. By doing this, you can change its code and modify it yourself according to your use case. Other American companies have already begun doing this. Like Perplexity AI. They downloaded the DeepSeek R1 model, which erased all censorship, and now you can use the R1 model in Perplexity. Microsoft did this too.

The Thief of AI: OpenAIs Claims Against DeepSeek

Now another point of criticism being made against DeepSeek is that they have copied their AI model entirely from OpenAI. OpenAI claims that it has evidence showing that DeepSeek has used its proprietary models to train itself. They claim to have distillation evidence, where the output from bigger models is used to improve the performance of smaller AI models to help smaller models give the same results at lower costs. Someone tweeted about how the robber has now been robbed.

The thing is, to some extent, ChetGPT has copied things from all over the internet to train itself. Many books were used without the permission of the authors to train their models. This is the reason why 17 renowned writers including the Game of Thrones author George RR Martin, filed a copyright infringement suit against OpenAI in September 2023.

The New York Times has also filed a case against OpenAI and Microsoft. Other than this, 8 American newspapers and many Canadian news outlets have filed cases on OpenAI.

How did DeepSeek start and what problems did it face?

This is good for us, but at the country and company level, we are seeing the beginning of AI wars. In 2022, the American government imposed export control so that the computer chips needed to train AI could not be used by other countries. Especially Chinese AI companies. It included NVIDIA's H100 chips, Chinese companies were unable to buy this. This was problematic for DeepSeek because they had to use NVIDIA's older computer chips to train their AI models. America tried its best to prevent any other country from developing foundational AI models like theirs by denying them the computer chips required to train AI models. And so the people working in DeepSeek were forced to innovate.

They created software that uses only a fraction of the resources and works more efficiently at only a fraction of the cost. this is why NVIDIA's stock fell the most. Because till a few months ago, companies like Meta, OpenAI, and Google were claiming that if we wanted to scale AI to a higher level, we would need more chips, more energy, and more money. But DeepSeek has done all of this by using less money, less energy, and outdated computer chips.