About

DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company that develops LLM models, 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 LLM model that rivals OpenAI's models at a fraction of the cost. The development led many American tech workers to comment on how China may be underselling its AI capabilities, that Silicon Valley tech workers may be inflating operating costs for LLM models, and that the American tech bubble might be set to burst in 2025.

Origin

On January 20th, 2025, Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek released DeepSeek-R1, an 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 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, gathering over 1,000 upvotes in five days.

Spread

Jokes about DeepSeek being High-Flyer's "side project" came from a January 22nd 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."

On January 23rd, X^[5] user @ArtificialAnlys made a post comparing DeepSeek-R1 with OpenAI o1, noting that it is 25x cheaper with 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 seemingly bloated costs of operating and providing LLM services in the United States. On January 23rd, 2025, an anonymous post on TeamBlind^[2] indicated 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 joke that gathered over 10,000 likes in two days.

Some American tech executives called DeepSeek-R1's release a "psyop," as seen in a January 24th, 2025 post by X^[6] @nealkhosla that 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 @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

DeepSeek overtook ChatGPT to become the #1 most downloaded app on the U.S. App Store on January 26th, 2025.^[9]

Search Interest

External References