DeepSeek’s tech breakthrough hailed in China as answer to win AI war

‘We should have confidence that China will eventually win the AI war with the US,’ Qihoo 360’s Zhou Hongyi said in a Weibo post

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Artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek was spun off from Chinese hedge-fund manager High-Flyer Quant. Photo: Reuters

Ben Jiangin BeijingandBien Perezin Hong Kong

Published: 12:00pm, 28 Jan 2025Updated: 6:25am, 29 Jan 2025

DeepSeek, extolled by some as the “biggest dark horse” in the open-source large language model (LLM) arena, now has a bull’s eye on its back, as the start-up is being touted as China’s secret weapon in the artificial intelligence (AI) war with the US.

The Hangzhou-based company sent shock waves across Wall Street and Silicon Valley for developing AI models at a fraction of the cost compared with OpenAI and Meta Platforms, which prompted US President Donald Trump to call the breakthrough a “wake-up call” and “positive” for America’s tech sector.

At home, Chinese tech executives and various commentators rushed to hail DeepSeek’s disruptive power.

Zhou Hongyi, co-founder, chairman and chief executive of Chinese cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360, declared that DeepSeek has “upended the world” in a recent video posted on his Weibo account, after the start-up’s release of two powerful new AI models – built at a lower cost and with less computing resources than what larger tech firms typically need for LLM development.

In a widely shared Weibo social media post, Feng Ji, founder and chief executive at Black Myth: Wukong developer Game Science, wrote that DeepSeek’s achievements in AI could change China’s “national fate” amid its prolonged tech war with the US.

On January 20, DeepSeek publicly released its open-source R1 reasoning model, which it claims is on par with the performance of OpenAI’s o1 – a model that the US start-up said can “reason through complex tasks and solve harder problems than previous models in science, coding and maths”.