It happened at the end of December: the Chinese made their chat GPT accessible. Media reports suggest that the solution is cheaper and of better quality than the American one from Open AI. It also turned out that the Chinese open source model cost around 6 million, which is a fraction of the huge sums that US companies had invested in the development of AI. Suffice it to say that just at the beginning of January (probably in response to the Chinese surprise) Microsoft stopped building a huge $3.3 billion data center that was to be dedicated to serving Open AI. If it’s true that the Chinese startup has gone toe-to-toe with Big Tech with less powerful chips… The situation could really shake up the markets.
Deep Seek is backed by the HighFlyer Capital fund, which has co-financed the project from the outset. The company is staffed with talented developers – but lacks the typical American “publicity” surrounding the creators, with the Chinese describing the company as the result of a “collective effort”. While the Chinese became successful in their typical modest, low-budget way, US companies bought hardware (AI chips, server racks and more) in bulk from companies like Nvidia and Broadcom, and the AI makers shone in the media spotlight. Recently, for example, the head of Open AI was shown in a meeting with Trump. Meta recently announced that it will invest more than 60 billion dollars in the new year. AI from China now seems to be like Sputnik in its day. When the Soviets launched their rocket, the West was so shocked that there was even talk of a Sputnik crisis at the time. Sputnik started the era of competition in space, today Deep Seek may be the one to set new standards and cause the crisis in the US stock market, especially the overvalued big tech companies.
Now companies such as Microsoft, Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) and Alphabet (Google) appear to be overvalued.
