Taking a deeper look at DeepSeek, the small Chinese AI startup shaking up Silicon Valley

CHINESE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) company DeepSeek has sent shockwaves through the tech community, with the release of extremely efficient AI models that can compete with cutting-edge products from U.S. companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

Founded in 2023, DeepSeek has achieved its results with a fraction of the cash and computing power of its competitors.

DeepSeek’s “reasoning” R1 model, released last week, provoked excitement among researchers, shock among investors, and responses from AI heavyweights. The company followed up on Jan. 28 with a model that can work with images as well as text.