NewDelhi: It was a dizzying breakthrough that sent shockwaves among US tech titans, destroying some $1 trillion in market value in a day as 20-month-old startup DeepSeek released its revolutionary AI assistant. Dubbed the ‘AI’s Sputnik moment,’ DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence assistant soon shot straight to the top of Apple’s App Store, on track to dethrone even ChatGPT in downloads across the US.
“OpenAI is not a god, nor can we always do leading-edge things,” said Liang Wenfeng, 39, its founder, in an interview with 36Kr, a Chinese media outlet, in July 2024. He didn’t take long to prove his point.
Melting hearts worldwide with its game-changing AI assistant, DeepSeek is giving the market a run with an affordable open-source chatbot that goes head-to-head with industry leaders. DeepSeek’s ascent has drawn comparisons from the international media to a Cold War-era “Sputnik” moment, marking the dawn of a new age of AI.
Liang Wenfeng, a self-taught engineering savant from China, is driving this revolution. Liang turned a stock-picking AI startup into a formidable rival to OpenAI. DeepSeek’s latest manoeuvre—a leading-edge AI experience for a fraction of the price—leaves everyone wondering whether this is the dawn of a new tech age.
DeepSeek’s chatbot, released in January 2025, provides a similar experience to ChatGPT in a much more affordable way. Its rapid rise as the top-rated free app on the US iOS App Store and download numbers that eclipsed ChatGPT made Nvidia’s stock price tumble. ChatGPT is open-source, meaning anyone can take it, modify it, and build on it.
DeepSeek’s AI-driven search engine transcends essential keyword matching with machine learning, natural language processing, and semantic search capabilities to comprehend the intent behind queries. Its algorithms adjust and learn over time, becoming more effective as they are used more often.
DeepSeek’s AI models—R1 being one of them—are changing the world. They offer state-of-the-art performance at a small fraction of the prices charged by OpenAI’s models—20 to 50 times cheaper. The efficiency has left investors wary that cheaper AI could sap demand for the pricey chips powering companies like Nvidia, leading to a single-day loss of $592.7 billion in Nvidia’s market value.
From humble origins in Guangdong, China, Liang Wenfeng has become a leader in AI innovation. Liang grew up in the 1980s, and her father was a primary school teacher. He received his degrees from Zhejiang University, one of the top universities in China. Liang started trading domestic stocks with two peers in school in 2008, founded High-Flyer in 2015, and adopted machine learning in its products by 2018.
In five months, we became DeepSeek: AN AI Lab by High-Flyer (Gautam Sukumar) to create Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). DeepSeek announced its first model, DeepSeek-Coder, in November 2023 and another, DeepSeek-V2, in May 2024, triggering a price war in China’s AI market. Nonetheless, despite competitive prices, DeepSeek turned a significant profit, something its competition failed to do.
On January 27, 2025, DeepSeek’s AI Assistant, with V3, became the top-rated free app in the US App Store, displacing ChatGPT. Its chatbot allegedly achieved results comparable to top AI models on benchmark tests.
In an unusual interview last year, Liang stressed that China’s AI industry must shift from imitation to innovation. “We often say the gap between Chinese and American AI is one or two years, but it’s not a gap between years; it’s a gap between originality and imitation,” he said. Unless this changes, China will always be a follower.
DeepSeek came into being out of necessity. China’s access to advanced chips, such as Nvidia’s H100, was restricted by US export controls in October 2022. Through novel techniques, Liang and his team further optimised the model architecture, which combined to make DeepSeek a powerhouse on a shoestring budget.
Liang is running a bottom-up company without a rigid hierarchy at DeepSeek. He sees innovation as a product of belief and confidence; he believes young people have both in spades. Liang’s ambition with DeepSeek is to help drive China forward in AI innovation.
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