China's DeepSeek launches App Store-topping AI model, rivaling OpenAI with fewer resources

What just happened? Chinese AI company DeepSeek released an open version of its reasoning model, R1, on January 20, 2025. The model has garnered much attention in the tech industry for its performance, which reportedly matches or exceeds OpenAI's o1 on certain AI benchmarks. Since its release, conversations on social media have been fast and furious about its potential impact on AI development and competition between Chinese and American tech companies.

Prominent venture capitalist Marc Andreessen was one of those impressed by the feat, writing on X that DeepSeek's model was "one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I've ever seen."

DeepSeek's accomplishment is particularly noteworthy given the company's claim to have trained a model with 671 billion parameters using just 2,048 Nvidia H800s and $5.6 million, a fraction of the resources typically required by industry giants like OpenAI and Google. This ...