Viral Chinese AI app DeepSeek has stopped working amid what appears to be a technical issue.
The largely-unknown company behind the app has limited new signups to phone numbers within China, effectively banning new registrations from international users. That appears to be an attempt to limit the number of people looking to log in and use the app.
A banner on the app’s web chat also said that DeepSeek’s “online services have faced large-scale malicious attacks”, though it did not say who it believed those attacks to have come from.
Monday’s outages were the latest in a run of problems in recent days, as DeepSeek has become a viral success. The perceived better performance of DeepSeek’s models led US tech companies to lose $1 trillion in valuation, amid fears that Chinese AI could overtake those in Silicon Valley.
DeepSeek was created in 2023, in the wake of excitement over other AI tools from companies such as ChatGPT. At that point, China was widely thought to be trailing behind US research and development of artificial intelligence.
Since its founding, however, DeepSeek has released a range of models that have helped increase confidence in the work coming from China. The startup has said that its more advanced models are on a par with those from OpenAI and Meta, while also being dramatically cheaper to use.
AI models from ChatGPT to DeepSeek require advanced chips to power their training. The Biden administration has since 2021 widened the scope of bans designed to stop these chips from being exported to China and used to train Chinese firms’ AI models.
However, DeepSeek researchers wrote in a paper last month that the DeepSeek-V3 used Nvidia’s H800 chips for training, spending 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, as well as the relatively cheap training costs, has prompted U.S. tech executives to question the effectiveness of tech export controls.
Little is known about the company behind DeepSeek, a small Hangzhou-based startup founded in 2023, when search engine giant Baidu released the first Chinese AI large-language model.
Since then, dozens of Chinese tech companies large and small have released their own AI models, but DeepSeek is the first to be praised by the U.S. tech industry as matching or even surpassing the performance of cutting-edge U.S. models.
Additional reporting by agencies
