DEEPSEEK:
A Revolutionary Tool for Humanity?
by Mirei Yo
- What’ s Deepseek?
DeepSeek is an AI development company based in Hangzhou, China. The release of its R1 model on January 2025 was explosive to say the least – within days of being on app stores across several platforms, tens and thousands of users globally have spontaneously accessed DeepSeek to test out its capabilities. But with something so popular, there is bound to be controversy.
- Why is it so controversial?
In the world of AI, there has been a prevailing fact that developing AI requires significant technical and financial resources; President Donald Trump was more than eager to fund a whopping 500,000,000 dollars from the U. S. government to support the development of Artificial Intelligence platforms in America( called Stargate Project). However, Chinese AI Deep- Seek’ s release proved the stereotype wrong- on Jan. 20, 2025, DeepSeek released its R1model at a fraction of the cost that other companies required and owed to create their models. Approximately only 6 million dollars was used to produce an AI preforming just as well, if not better than Open AI’ s Chat GPT, with an open-source license, completely free of charge. Another significant reason that surrounds the Deep- Seek controversy is most definitely American Propaganda in my opinion. Across history, it’ s completely natural for people to develop a sense of nationalism toward their own countries, and the United States is no exception. Throughout modern history, China and America have been in a tense competition to see who attained more innovative achievements faster and with less resources- as a trite proverb states: do more with less. Americans, of course, saw their country as being at the cutting edge of modern tech. Many were unsurprisingly shocked when, within the first days of deepseeks release, the Chinese based AI app hit the top of Apple’ s App store chart, outnumbering OpenAI’ s ChatGPT app. In fact, the whole nation was impacted heavily from its release that it triggered a market shock which saw significant drops in AI vendors based in the US; on Jan 27 2025, the entire Nasdaq Composite( US stock market) dropped by 3.4 % at market, losing approximately $ 600 BILLION DOLLARS in market price. Furthermore, Deepseek was developed through countless of restrictions including budget, but it still managed to achieve technical glory by surpassing US’ s Chat GPT by a large margin – A business model threat for US developers, indeed, seeing that OpenAI ran on proprietary technology, while DeepSeek ran on open source and free access. DeepSeek, henceforth have been banned in several environments in the US.
- Why is it so useful? DeepSeek provides free access for anyone, anywhere. For those in Mainland China, it is great news that not all AI platforms require VPN’ s anymore. DeepSeek further managed to achieve the title as a MIT-licensed