About

DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company that develops large-language models (LLM), not unlike ChatGPT or OpenAI o1. The company was founded by the Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, ostensibly as a "side-project" that later spun off into its own company. In January 2025, DeepSeek released DeepSeek-R1, an open-source LLM model that claims to match OpenAI's reasoning models at a fraction of the cost. The software was met with criticism from some American tech entrepreneurs who were wary of how DeepSeek censored itself and refused to discuss topics like Tiananmen Square or Chinese President Xi Jinping. However, the development also led to many American tech workers commenting on how Silicon Valley may be inflating operating costs for LLM models and that the American tech bubble might be set to burst in 2025. The release notably caused a dip in various AI-related stocks for some companies and U.S. and European firms, including Nvidia. Additionally, numerous memes referencing DeepSeek and the market turmoil it caused appeared online in late January 2025.

History

On January 20th, 2025, Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek released DeepSeek-R1, an open-source LLM model similar to OpenAI's o1. The reasoning model was initially created as part of the Chinese quant hedge fund High Flyer and was released to the public for free, alongside paid tiers for enterprises. The model stood in contrast to OpenAI's o1 at the time, with DeepSeek reportedly charging people around one-thirtieth of what o1 cost to run.^[1]

Redditor^[4] /u/kristaller486 posted about DeepSeek releasing "6 distilled versions of R1 + R1" on January 20th, 2025, to the /r/LocalLLaMA subreddit, gathering over 1,000 upvotes and 360 comments in five days.

Online Presence

Following its debut, DeepSeek and its DeepSeek-R1 rapidly became trending topics around the internet, receiving significant media coverage, discussion posts, memes and other reactions in late January 2025.

Jokes about DeepSeek being High-Flyer's "side project" came from a January 22nd, 2025, tweet from X^[8] user @hxiao, who wrote, "deepseek’s holding 幻方量化 is a quant company, many years already, super smart guys with top math background; happened to own a lot GPU for trading/mining purpose, and deepseek is their side project for squeezing those gpus." The tweet received over 373,000 views, 4,100 likes and 90 replies in five days.

On January 23rd, X^[5] user @ArtificialAnlys made a post comparing DeepSeek-R1 with OpenAI o1, noting that it is 25x cheaper while claiming it had the same reasoning capacities. The post gathered over 1,500 likes in two days.

The release of DeepSeek-R1 led to widespread discourse among American tech workers about the allegedly bloated costs of operating and providing LLM services in the United States. For instance, on January 23rd, 2025, an anonymous post on TeamBlind^[2] claimed that Meta's GenAI workers were in "panic mode" after the release of DeepSeek-R1.

Also on January 23rd, X^[3] user @AarushSah_ posted a Tony Stark Was Able To Build This meme about Meta that gathered over 10,000 likes in two days.

On January 26th, tech investor Marc Andreeson posted a meme to his X^[11] account depicting AI companies fighting each other while the European Union (EU) focuses on bottle-cap regulation, gathering over 74,000 likes in a day. The meme was reposted to the subreddit /r/PeterExplainsTheJoke^[12] by Redditor /u/YaarKhaa, where it gathered over 7,000 upvotes in a day.

DeepSeek notably overtook ChatGPT to become the number one most downloaded app on the U.S. App Store on January 26th, 2025.^[9]

On January 27th, 2025, numerous media outlets began reporting on DeepSeek's impact on stock markets, particularly in the U.S. and Europe, noting that the Nasdaq Composite, which tracks the U.S.'s biggest tech firms, plunged more than 3 percent, while the S&P 500 dropped almost 2 percent.^[14]

Criticisms

On January 24th, 2025, a video of Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang speculating that DeepSeek has "50,000 NVIDIA H100s" (a high-end GPU or graphics card designed specifically for AI applications) began making the rounds on Twitter / X. A clip posted by X^[13] @kimmonismus gathered over 5 million views and 11,000 likes in three days.

Billionaire and Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang: DeepSeek has about 50,000 NVIDIA H100s that they can't talk about because of the US export controls that are in place. pic.twitter.com/J8ZIXwS2Ja

— Chubby♨️ (@kimmonismus) January 24, 2025

Some American tech executives also called DeepSeek-R1's release a "psyop," as seen in a January 24th post by X^[6] user @nealkhosla who called the release "economic warfare" aimed at making "American ai unprofitable."

Other internet users criticized DeepSeek for bowing to Chinese censorship, as seen in a January 24th, 2025, post^[7] by X user @wongmjane that showed the LLM censoring itself when asked to discuss Xi Jinping in real-time. The post gathered over 16,000 likes in three days.

DeepSeek censors its own response in realtime as soon as Xi Jinping is mentioned pic.twitter.com/Nb2ylRXERG

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) January 24, 2025

On January 25th, Redditor^[10] /u/panamasian_14 posted a screen recording of DeepSeek censoring itself when asked about Tiananmen Square, gathering over 9,800 upvotes and 700 comments in two days.

Astroturfing Accusations

Amid the discourse surrounding DeepSeek in late January 2025, numerous internet users began posting about DeepSeek purportedly astroturfing various platforms with pro-China / pro-DeepSeek and anti-U.S. / anti-Silicon Valley content, especially with memes on Reddit.

For Instance, on January 26th, 2025, Redditor NovWhiskey posted a meme to the /r/ChatGPT^[16] subreddit with an image macro stating, "Isn't DeepSeek Amazing," referencing the many posts about the Chinese-based AI. The meme accumulated over 1,700 upvotes and 500 comments in three days, with numerous comments from other Redditors alleging there had been a pro-China campaign across Reddit in the last week.

Between January 25th and 29th, several other discussion threads and posts accusing DeepSeek of astroturfing appeared on different subs, including /r/singularity,^[17][20] /r/fucktheccp^[18] and /r/ClaudeAI,^[19] among others.

On January 28th, 2025, Redditor Acceptable_Donut7284 posted a meme to the /r/meme^[15] subreddit about the massive influx of positive DeepSeek memes on the site, receiving over 550 upvotes and 70 comments in a day before the post was locked by mods. Many of the comments notably claimed Chinese bots were posting the memes.

Search Interest

External References