China’s DeepSeek AI has taken everyone by surprise, shaking up the market in unexpected ways, says tech journalist Chris Stokel-Walker.
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00:00I don't think a lot of people had heard of DeepSeek until yesterday. I certainly hadn't.
00:07People saying it sort of came out of nowhere. Were you aware of it? Was it on your radar?
00:12The model itself was released on Boxing Day just after Christmas 2024. So it has been
00:17around a little while for those who have been watching the AI scene. But certainly we hadn't
00:22expected it to become quite as popular and quite as significant in terms of spooking
00:27the market. Now, obviously, this is something that has been bubbling under for a little
00:30while in terms of the company, developed by a Chinese quantitative hedge fund founder
00:37who was using AI to try and pick out the best stocks possible, has been sort of earmarking
00:43a lot of these NVIDIA GPU chips, the AI chips that power these models, for a good number
00:50of years now.
00:51But really, it broke cover, I suppose, in the last week. And yeah, it has been a surprise,
00:56I think, to everybody, not just in terms of the performance of the model, but also in
01:00terms of the impact it has on the market.