Chinese AI Startup DeepSeek Faces Outages Amid Surge in Popularity Across the Globe Including U.S.

DeepSeek, a Chinese firm, experienced continuous outages on its website on Monday, coinciding with its AI assistant becoming the top-rated free software on Apple’s software Store in the United States. The corporation rectified issues with its application programming interface and users’ inability to log in, according to its status page. These disruptions, the longest in 90 days, coincide with the app’s increasing popularity.

Powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, the AI application has gained immense traction among U.S. users since its release on January 10, according to app data research firm Sensor Tower. The creators of DeepSeek claim that their model “tops the leaderboard among open-source AI models and rivals the most advanced closed-source models globally.”

DeepSeek’s innovative technology had a significant market impact on Silicon Valley while challenging long-held ideas about US artificial intelligence technological superiority and compelling Washington to reassess its export control policies for the Chinese AI and chip industries.

DeepSeek succeeded despite US rules that ban the sale of advanced processors to China. Since 2021, the Biden administration has introduced stronger limitations aiming at discouraging Chinese companies from using sophisticated semiconductors for AI model training activities. According to DeepSeek researchers, DeepSeek-V3 underwent training on Nvidia’s H800 chips for a total cost of less than $6 million.

The contentious remark concerning the chip type appears to contravene US regulations, owing to expert scepticism about the technology level used in DeepSeek research, which employs less banned sophisticated processors. Many US tech CEOs are sceptical about the effectiveness of these legislative efforts to prevent Chinese advances in AI technology.

DeepSeek, a Chinese startup, was founded in Hangzhou in 2023 before quickly becoming successful as various Chinese technology firms released their AI models. DeepSeek gained significant success by being the first Chinese large-language model to receive widespread plaudits from American tech experts, who claim it outperforms advanced US models.