Financial markets went into a panic last week over an obscure Chinese tech start-up called DeepSeek. The company now threatens to upend the world of artificial intelligence and the race for who will dominate it.Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at The Times, discusses how DeepSeek caught us all off guard.Guests: Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The New York Times and co-host of the Times tech podcast, “Hard Fork.”Background reading: DeepSeek’s model has rocked Silicon Valley and upended several fundamental assumptions about A.I. progress.Listen to “Hard Fork”: Your guide to the DeepSeek freakout.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Greg Baker/Agence France-Presse Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitro-Eff. This is The Daily. Last week, financial markets went into a panic over an obscure Chinese tech startup called DeepSeek. That company now threatens to upend the world of artificial intelligence and the race for who will dominate it.
Today, my colleague Kevin Roos, a tech columnist and the co-host of the podcast Hard Fork, on how DeepSeek caught us all off guard. It's Monday, February 3rd. Hi, Kevin. Hello.
So great to be here.
So let's jump in. Kevin, how did this giant AI tech freakout begin? Tell us that story.
So the freakout really started in earnest with a Chinese AI company called DeepSeek. And DeepSeek had released a new AI model. You know, models are released all the time. Generally, they don't make international news. But this model was different in a few ways.
DeepSeek released its new chatbot app, which is said to perform as well as ChatGPT.
One of them was that it just appeared to be a really good model, like better than the leading Chinese models at the time and on par or close to on par with the leading American models.
A new AI king was crowned today. Well, at least for now.
And so the DeepSeek app.
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