How DeepSeek Suddenly Became Everybody's Business

We come across innovations every day, but disruptions are hard to come by. Is this one?

- JANANI G. VIKRAM

Everybody started talking about DeepSeek one fine day—from investors and tech champions to company heads and political leaders! They either love its potential to shake up the artificial intelligence (AI) industry or hate what it is doing to their earlier investments. What is your take on it—love or hate? We lay out the facts so you can decide for yourself.

Necessity is the mother of invention

People once thought only students from premier educational institutions could crack the Joint Engineering Entrance (JEE) examination. Then came the so-called 'Kota Factory'. Has it ever occurred to you that the standout factor of the Kota model is perhaps not the intensive study materials or relentless testing but that many professors break the language barrier and teach science and mathematics in Hinglish, taking it to a broader number of aspirants?

Well, DeepSeek's success can be understood along these lines. It was the outcome of a techie cum investor trying to tide over the embargoes that the US government kept imposing on the export of high-end chips to some countries, especially China.

In a small office in Hangzhou, China, tech enthusiast Liang Wenfeng harnessed AI models to analyse stock patterns, building a $13 billion portfolio for High- Flyer Capital, the quantitative hedge fund he founded in 2016. His deep obsession with AI drove him to acquire around 10,000 Nvidia GPUs—more than most Chinese tech firms had at the time. Wenfeng later stated in a media interview that his massive Nvidia stockpile stemmed purely from curiosity, not business strategy.