Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

Chinese startup DeepSeek claims its AI models can match the performance of those made by OpenAI and Meta — but at a fraction of the cost.

DeepSeek is shaking up the AI industry with cost-efficient large-language models it claims can perform just as well as rivals from giants like OpenAI and Meta. The Chinese startup says its flagship R1 reasoning model is capable of achieving “performance comparable” to OpenAI’s o1 equivalent, while the newly-released Janus Pro multimodal AI model can supposedly outperform Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 3.

DeepSeek’s ChatGPT competitor quickly soared to the top of the App Store, and the company is disrupting financial markets, with shares of Nvidia dipping 17 percent by 2PM on January 27th. The AI assistant is powered by the startup’s “state-of-the-art” DeepSeek-V3 model, allowing users to ask questions, plan trips, generate text, and more. As downloads of DeepSeek’s app spiked, the startup began restricting signups due to “malicious attacks.”

Launched in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek has garnered attention for building open-source AI models using less cash and fewer GPUs when compared to the billions spent by OpenAI, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others. If DeepSeek’s performance claims are true, it could prove that the startup managed to build powerful AI models despite strict US export controls preventing chipmakers like Nvidia from selling high-performance graphics cards in China.

Here’s all the latest on DeepSeek.