DeepSeek is hit by a cyberattack as users flock to the Chinese AI startup
DeepSeek, a Chinese company, announced on Monday that it will temporarily ban registrations due to a hack, after the company’s AI assistant’s growing popularity.
Earlier in the day, the startup’s website experienced difficulties when its AI assistant became the highest-rated free software on Apple’s software Store in the US.
According to its status page, the corporation has rectified issues with its application programming interface and users’ inability to log in to the website. The disruptions on Monday were the company’s longest in around 90 days, coinciding with its skyrocketing popularity.
DeepSeek last week unveiled a free assistant that it claims uses less data and costs a tenth of the price of incumbent players’ models, perhaps signaling a tipping point in the degree of investment required for AI.
Powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, which its creators claim “tops the leaderboard among open-source models and rivals the most advanced closed-source models globally,” the Artificial Intelligence app has grown in popularity among US users since its release on January 10, according to app data research firm Sensor Tower.
The milestone demonstrates how DeepSeek has left a lasting impression on Silicon Valley, challenging commonly held beliefs about US AI dominance and the efficacy of Washington’s export bans targeting China’s superior chip and AI technologies.
On Monday, technology stocks were battered, with Nvidia and Oracle shares falling.
AI models ranging from ChatGPT to DeepSeek require modern CPUs to fuel their training. Since 2021, the Biden administration has expanded the breadth of sanctions intended to prevent these chips from being transferred to China and used to train Chinese corporations’ AI algorithms.
However, DeepSeek researchers said in a study last month that the DeepSeek-V3 trained on Nvidia’s H800 chips for less than $6 million.
Although this detail has since been disputed, the claim that the chips used were less powerful than the most advanced Nvidia products Washington has sought to keep out of China, combined with the relatively low training costs, has prompted US tech executives to question the efficacy of tech export restrictions.
Little is known about DeepSeek, a modest Hangzhou-based startup launched in 2023, when search engine giant Baidu debuted the first Chinese AI large-language model.
Since then, scores of Chinese software companies, both large and small, have released their own AI models, but DeepSeek is the first to be praised by the US tech industry for matching or even outperforming cutting-edge US models.