DeepSeek

The Chinese company DeepSeek, founded in 2023, developed the powerful language model DeepSeek-V3 in December 2024.  The company released a free model available to users on the last weekend of January 2025. 

DeepSeek-V3 has 671 billion parameters and was trained in 55 days at a cost of about 5.58 million US dollars. This is significantly less compared to similar models from Western companies such as OpenAI and Google.

The new free AI model that DeepSeek released became the top app in the App Store rankings on the last weekend of January, which led to a fall in the share prices of technology companies in other countries.

DeepSeek's success caused concern among investors, which led to a decline in the shares of technology companies, in particular Nvidia and Microsoft, as well as Japanese chipmakers.

Despite US sanctions, DeepSeek has achieved significant success in AI development using less powerful resources, which has called into question the high valuations of Western companies such as Nvidia.