Deepseek hit by outages as users flock to Chinese AI startup

Chinese startup Deepseek said Monday it is temporarily limiting dua recordings in a malicious attack on its services.

Deepseek was hit by outages on its website after its assistant became the top-rated free app available on Apple’s US Apple Store

The company resolved issues related to its application programming interface and users’ inability to sign in to the website, according to its status page. Monday’s outage was the company’s longest in about 90 days and coincided with its skyrocketing popularity.

Powered by the Deepseek-V3 model, which its creators say “tops the leaderboard among open-source models and rivals the most advanced closed-source models globally,” the AI ​​application has grown in popularity among US users since it was released in Jan Jan Jan. 10.

The milestone underscores how Deepseek has made a deep impression on Silicon Valley, upending widely held views about US superiority in AI and the effectiveness of Washington’s export controls targeting China’s advanced chip and AI capabilities.

AI models from Chatgpt to Deepseek require advanced chips to power their training. The Biden administration has since 2021 expanded 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 Deepseek-V3 used NVIDIA’s H800 chips for training, spending less than $6 million.

Although that detail has since been disputed, the claim that the chips used were less powerful than the more advanced Nvidia products Washington has sought to keep out of China, as well as the relatively cheap costs, has led US tech executives to question the effectiveness of technology 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 model in the big language.

Since then, dozens of Chinese tech companies big and small have released their own AI models, but DeepSeek is the first to be rated by the US tech industry as matching or even surpassing the performance of larger US models.