Chinese AI app DeepSeek shocks US tech industry with groundbreaking innovation

China

Chinese AI app DeepSeek shocks US tech industry with groundbreaking innovation

2025-01-28 17:39 Last Updated At：01-29 00:57

The Chinese AI app DeepSeek has sent shockwaves through the US scientific and technological communities, drawing widespread attention for its revolutionary innovations and capabilities.

In late December of 2024, DeepSeek released the hybrid model DeepSeek-V3, whose evaluation scores in multiple tests have surpassed open-source models such as Llama-3.1-405B, and its performance is comparable to the world's top closed-source models GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. In addition, DeepSeek-V3 is more cost-effective.

On January 20, the opening day of the World Economic Forum (WEF) 2025 Annual Meeting, DeepSeek released its latest open-source model DeepSeek-R1, which has achieved an important technological breakthrough -- using pure deep learning methods to allow AI to spontaneously emerge with reasoning capabilities.

In tasks such as mathematics, coding and natural language reasoning, the performance of this model is comparable to the leading models from heavyweights like OpenAI, according to DeepSeek.

The training cost of DeepSeek-R1 amounts to a mere 5.6 million U.S. dollars, a figure that stands in stark contrast to the hundreds of millions - or even billions - of dollars invested by American tech giants like OpenAI, Google, and Meta.

At present, DeepSeek has topped the Apple App Store's free downloads in the U.S., outpacing ChatGPT in free downloads.

According to the Reuters, Nvidia on Monday said DeepSeek's advances show the usefulness of its chips for the Chinese market and that more of its chips will be needed in the future to meet demand for DeepSeek's services.

In an interview with China Media Group (CMG), Robert McCooey, vice chairman of Nasdaq, said DeepSeek is going to be an important aspect of the AI revolution.

"I think that AI will continue to be one of the most important revolutions, will be some of the most important things that we will experience in our lifetime and DeepSeek is going to be an important aspect of that," McCooey said.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday said that the release of DeepSeek should be a wake-up call for our industries that they need to be laser-focused on competing.

Trump described the low-cost model as "very much a positive development" for the AI industry, emphasizing that rather than investing billions upon billions, firms can achieve comparable results at a fraction of the cost.

U.S. freezes immigrant visa processing from 75 countries

The U.S. State Department announced Wednesday that it is pausing immigrant visa processing from 75 countries.

The measure will apply to "countries whose migrants take welfare from the American people at unacceptable rates. The freeze will remain active until the U.S. can ensure that new immigrants will not extract wealth from the American people," the department said on X.

The pause impacts countries including Somalia, Haiti, Iran and Eritrea, "whose immigrants often become public charges on the United States upon arrival," said the State Department.

Earlier on Wednesday, the department announced in a memo that it would suspend visa processing for 75 countries, including Somalia, Russia, Afghanistan, Brazil, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Nigeria, Thailand and Yemen, according to a Fox News report.

The pause will begin Jan. 21 and will continue indefinitely until the department conducts a reassessment of visa processing, the report said. The move came after the White House announced on Tuesday that it is ending temporary protected status for Somali immigrants amid fraud allegations in Minnesota.

On Monday, the State Department announced on social media that it had revoked over 100,000 visas since U.S. President Donald Trump took office nearly a year ago.

In November 2025, Trump announced his intention to permanently suspend immigration from what he described as "Third World countries", following the death of a National Guard member after being shot near the White House by an Afghan national.