How DeepSeek flipped the tech world on its head overnight

DeepSeek, the chatbot made by a Chinese startup that seemingly dethroned ChatGPT, is taking the world by storm. It’s currently the number one topic all over the news, and a lot has happened in the past 24 hours. Among other highlights, Nvidia’s stock plummeted as a response to DeepSeek; President Donald Trump commented on the new AI; Mark Zuckerberg is assembling a team to find an answer to DeepSeek. Below, we’ll cover all the latest news you need to know about DeepSeek.

Nvidia gets hit by the rise of DeepSeek

Although ChatGPT is the chatbot that quickly lost its public favorite status with the rise of DeepSeek, Nvidia is the company that suffered the greatest losses. In fact, Nvidia’s market loss following the launch of DeepSeek’s large language model (LLM) marks the greatest one-day stock market drop in history, says Forbes. Nvidia lost nearly $600 billion as a result of the Chinese company behind DeepSeek revealing just how cheap the new LLM is to develop in comparison to rivals from Anthropic, Meta, or OpenAI.

Nvidia now holds the top spots for the two biggest one-day stock market losses in history, but the other two were nowhere near as bad as this. Yesterday, Nvidia’s shares nosedived by 17%, adding up to a $589 billion loss in market capitalization. Previous loss took place in September 2024 and was valued at $279 billion.

Markets are emotional, and they responded to DeepSeek’s claims that it only spent $5.6 million on Nvidia’s high-performance computing (HPC) graphics cards in order to develop DeepSeek. Experts claim that figure is vastly lower than the reality, but it’s also a lot lower than anything anyone has ever thought possible, calling into question the need for so many of Nvidia’s GPUs to be sold and used on a daily basis for the purpose of training AI.

Nvidia’s stocks are beginning to bounce back, recovering from just over $116 on Tuesday morning to just under $121 per share at the time of writing. On Friday, the stock price was at $142 per share.

President Trump: “A wake-up call”

President Donald Trump made a statement about DeepSeek, calling it “a wake-up call” for the U.S. tech industry. He referred to DeepSeek’s claim that its new R1 AI model can do all of the same things as its rivals, but it’ll cost a mere fraction of what OpenAI, Meta, and others have spent on their alternatives.

As seen on BBC, President Trump said: “The release of DeepSeek, an AI from a Chinese company, should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win. […] We always have the ideas, we’re always first. I would say that it could be very much a positive development. Instead of spending billions and billions, you’ll spend less, and you’ll come up with, hopefully, the same solution.”

Meta is scrambling for solutions

As mentioned above, OpenAI is far from the only company affected by the sudden interest in DeepSeek. In fact, as reported by Fortune, the new LLM has Mark Zuckerberg scrambling for urgent solutions. The publication reports that Meta has “assembled four war rooms of engineers” with the sole purpose of figuring out how DeepSeek achieved what it claims to have achieved, as well as spearheading innovation on Meta’s end.

Fortune reveals that two of the four teams of engineers will focus on finding out how DeepSeek was able to build such a capable LLM at such a low cost. One team’s purpose will be to find out which data sets DeepSeek was trained on. Meanwhile, the final team’s goal will be to work on restructuring Meta’s Llama models and searching for improvements.

Elon Musk isn’t buying what DeepSeek is selling

Elon Musk took to X (formerly Twitter) to express his doubt as to whether DeepSeek can truly do what it claims to be capable of at such a low cost. He responded to various posts, such as one from Mark Benioff, Salesforce CEO, who announced that DeepSeek was now the number one app on the Apple AppStore. Musk’s many responses were generally poking fun at the AI and its impact on the industry.

😂

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 27, 2025

Lmao no

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 27, 2025

OpenAI’s Sam Altman is up to the challenge

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Sam Altman adopted a different approach. In a short series of posts on X, the CEO behind the company that runs ChatGPT praised DeepSeek while also making it clear that OpenAI isn’t going anywhere.

deepseek’s r1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they’re able to deliver for the price.

we will obviously deliver much better models and also it’s legit invigorating to have a new competitor! we will pull up some releases.

— Sam Altman (@sama) January 28, 2025

“We will obviously deliver much better models and it’s also legit invigorating to have a new competitor! We will pull up some releases,” said Altman. “Look forward to bringing you all AGI and beyond.”

DeepSeek suffered its first major cyberattack

Going viral has some downsides, as DeepSeek has quickly found out. As reported by CNBC and DeepSeek’s own signup site, the chatbot is being hit with large-scale cyberattacks. As a result, new users may have a hard time registering, as DeepSeek is limiting sign-ups while it deals with these issues.

While new users may be unable to join at the moment, if you’re already signed up, you should be able to use DeepSeek without issues.

Experts are wary of DeepSeek

While the world is hyped with the buzz around DeepSeek, experts are less eager to embrace the new chatbot. As reported by The Guardian, there are data privacy concerns to keep in mind when interacting with the new budget-friendly AI model.

A professor from Oxford University warned that the data you share with the chatbot could end up in the hands of the Chinese government, saying: “I think it’s fine to download it and ask it about the performance of Liverpool football club or chat about the history of the Roman empire, but would I recommend putting anything sensitive or personal or private on them? Absolutely not — because you don’t know where the data goes.”