CHINESE tech startup DeepSeek said it was hit by a cyber attack on Monday that disrupted users’ ability to register on the site. The company, whose artificial intelligence chatbot has sent the tech world into a frenzy, said that it had suffered “large-scale malicious attacks” on its services. Registered users could log in normally, DeepSeek said. DeepSeek began attracting more attention in the AI industry last month when it released a new AI model that it boasted was on par with similar models from US companies such as ChatGPT maker OpenAI, and was more cost-effective in its use of expensive Nvidia chips to train the system on huge troves of data. The chatbot became more widely accessible when it appeared on Apple and Google app stores early this year.

 

By Monday, DeepSeek’s AI assistant had become the No. 1 downloaded free app on Apple’s iPhone store. The jump in popularity fuelled debates over competition between the US and China in developing AI technology. But some US tech industry observers said they were worried about the idea that the Chinese startup has caught up with the American companies at the forefront of generative AI at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek was founded in Hangzhou, China in 2023. 

 

 PRESIDENT Donald Trump has said that the sudden rise of the Chinese app DeepSeek “should be a wake-up call” for American companies developing artificial intelligence as they need to be laser-focused on competing to win. DeepSeek says its artificial intelligence models are comparable with those from US giants, like OpenAI which is behind ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, but potentially a fraction of the cost. Trump also mentioned that DeepSeek is a positive development as it’s cheaper. “Today and over the last couple of days, I’ve been reading about China and some of the companies in China, one in particular coming up with faster method of AI and a much less expensive method. That’s good because you don’t have to spend as much money. I view that as a positive as an asset,” Trump said. “So, I really think if it’s fact and if it’s true and nobody really knows if it is, but I view that as a positive because you’ll be doing that too. So, you won’t be spending as much and you’ll get the same result,” he said and quickly added a word of caution to the US tech firms.