DeepSeek, the latest alternative to ChatGPT and other AI assistants, recently released a new version that’s causing chaos and confusion across the AI landscape. With reports about DeepSeek’s outstanding performance and power efficiency emerging, established entities like OpenAI and Meta are getting quite nervous.
None more nervous than Nvidia, though, whose market cap plummeted in response to the hype over DeepSeek. According to Bloomberg, Nvidia lost a record $569 billion at the start of the week. Companies like Siemens Energy and Oracle also saw their stock prices fall.
Why the hype over DeepSeek?
DeepSeek is an AI tool that’s currently available free of charge on the web. You can check it out yourself at chat.deepseek.com, although registration is temporarily on hold due to the recent surge in interest.
Not only was DeepSeek developed by a Chinese startup in just a few months, it apparently uses significantly fewer resources. Although it’s reminiscent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, it’s based on its own large language model called — you guessed it — “DeepSeek,” now version 3.
According to some initial impressions, DeepSeek outperforms the competition for many features, including the generation of textual answers and the prompt-based creation of images. The latter is possible with an additional app called Janus Pro. DeepSeek delivers results quickly, and those results are both detailed and coherent.
DeepSeek is currently so popular that it’s the most downloaded app in Apple’s App Store (ahead of ChatGPT) and the highest app in the “Top Free Apps” category in the Google Play Store (ahead of ChatGPT, Threads, and Google Gemini). This puts enormous pressure on OpenAI and the rest, who now see their positions jeopardized.
DDoS attacks halt DeepSeek’s rise
Shortly after the publicized success of DeepSeek, the new AI chatbot faced a bitter setback. There’s apparently been a “large-scale cyber attack” on the company, reports BleepingComputer. As a result, new user registrations are not being accepted at this time. However, anyone who already has access to DeepSeek can continue to use it.
It’s currently unknown who carried out the attack on DeepSeek, but it’s likely to be a targeted DDoS attack, perhaps perpetrated by an entity who feels threatened by DeepSeek’s sudden catching of attention. We don’t know when DeepSeek user registrations will open again.
Further reading: ChatGPT gets over 1 billion messages per day
This article originally appeared on our sister publication PC-WELT and was translated and localized from German.
