DeepSeek, the Chinese startup that has managed to make a mockery of Silicon Valley’s capital-bloated AI oligarchy, has done it again. On Monday morning, the company announced the release of yet another open-source AI system, this one an image generator that—the company claimed—could best OpenAI’s DALL-E and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion generators.
The model—Janus-Pro-7B—was announced in a technical paper shared on DeepSeek’s GitHub page Monday. It is an update of Janus, a simpler model that was released last October. Janus promises to bring multi-modal automation to new heights, and can conduct both image generation and image analysis, the company said. The paper claims that DeepSeek’s model outperforms both DALL-E and Stable Diffusion on multiple AI benchmarks.
The new model release follows news that the startup’s R1 model, which was released in December, has surpassed ChatGPT in downloads on the Apple app store. That would be news enough on its own, but DeepSeek also claims it was able to create R1—which is an open-source “reasoning” model—in only two months with, what it claims, was only $6 million. Given that the U.S.’s top AI company, OpenAI, is worth over a hundred billion dollars and is closed-source, you can see why America’s tech oligarchs might be freaking out about this.
On the same morning that DeepSeek released its image-generator, the company said it was suffering from “large-scale malicious attacks” on its network, Reuters reported. As a result, the company said it would temporarily limit user registrations, though service would not be impacted for existing users.
DeepSeek’s releases have sent shockwaves through the U.S. stock market, and it isn’t difficult to see why. America has increasingly sought to structure its entire economy around the AI industry, and Wall Street has poured billions into the companies selling this technology. Most recently, the Trump administration announced “Stargate,” a $500 billion effort to create “AI infrastructure” by building data centers across the U.S. The gross amount of power and capital that has flowed into the small coterie of tech companies behind this technology is truly obscene. And yet, somehow, a Chinese company that appears to have a smidgeon of Big Tech’s resources was able to create a comparable product in less time and fly to the top of the mobile downloads charts in a matter of weeks.
As such, investors have rushed to sell off tech stocks and a lot of people are saying stuff like “RIP ChatGPT” and “DeepSeek could be an extinction-level event for venture capital firms.”
Before we write OpenAI’s obituary just yet, however, it should be noted that commentators are predicting that DeepSeek’s innovations could very well deepen America’s commitment to the AI industry. As we all know, America always needs to be the best at everything, and the fact that it’s been one-upped in the AI arms race can mean only one thing: it’s time to double down.
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