DeepSeek: China's AI firm making waves in Silicon Valley

Chinese firm DeepSeek's artificial intelligence chatbot has soared to the top of the Apple Store's download charts, stunning industry insiders and analysts with its ability to match its U.S. competitors.

The program has shaken up the tech industry and hit U.S. titans, including Nvidia and Meta, which have spent vast sums of cash to get ahead in the fast-developing AI sector.

Here's what you need to know about DeepSeek:

DeepSeek was developed by a start-up based in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, which is known for its high density of tech firms.

Available as an app or on desktop, DeepSeek can do many of the things that its Western competitors can do -- write song lyrics, help work on a personal development plan, or even write a recipe for dinner based on what's in the fridge.

It can communicate in multiple languages, though it told AFP that it was strongest in English and Chinese.

It is subject to many of the limitations seen in other Chinese-made chatbots like Baidu's Ernie Bot -- asked about leader Xi Jinping or Beijing's policies in the western region of Xinjiang, it implored AFP to "talk about something else."

But from writing complex code to solving difficult sums, industry insiders have been astonished by just how well DeepSeek's abilities match the competition.

"What we've found is that DeepSeek... is the top performing, or roughly on par with the best American models," Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, told CNBC.

That's all the more surprising given what is known about how it was made.

In a paper detailing its development, the firm said the model was trained using only a fraction of the chips used by its Western competitors.

AFP