Tumbling stock market values and wild claims have accompanied the release of a new AI chatbot by a small Chinese company. What makes it so different?
The release of China’s new DeepSeek AI-powered chatbot app has rocked the technology industry. It quickly overtook OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the most-downloaded free iOS app in the US, and caused chip-making company Nvidia to lose almost $600bn (£483bn) of its market value in one day – a new US stock market record.
The reason behind this tumult? The “large language model” (LLM) that powers the app has reasoning capabilities that are comparable to US models such as OpenAI’s o1, but reportedly requires a fraction of the cost to train and run.