DeepSeek, a new AI assistant from China, shakes Silicon Valley

A small lab in China has shaken Silicon Valley.

A small lab in China has shaken Silicon Valley.

The sudden appearance of an advanced AI assistant from DeepSeek, a previously little-known company in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, has sparked discussion and debate within the U.S. tech industry about what it says about the broader AI development race.

DeepSeek’s assistant hit No. 1 on the Apple App Store in recent days, and the AI models powering the assistant are already outperforming top U.S. models, with the company saying that they were made with a fraction of the resources.

DeepSeek released its latest large language model, R1, a week ago. Second only to OpenAI’s o1 model in the Artificial Analysis Quality Index, a well-followed independent AI analysis ranking, R1 is already beating a range of other models including Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Meta’s Llama 3.3-70B and OpenAI’s GPT-4o.

“DeepSeek R1 is AI’s Sputnik moment,” entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, known for cowriting Mosaic, one of the world’s first web browsers, wrote Sunday on X, likening it to the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and the event that forced the U.S. to realize that its technological abilities were not unassailable.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/china-ai-assistant-deepseek-rcna189385

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