DeepSeek is a Chinese AI research company founded by “Liang Wenfung”, the head of the High-Flyer hedge fund. The rise of DeepSeek has even impacted NVIDIA, which has long dominated the AI chip market. Many believed that NVIDIA would continue to control the demand for AI chips as the frontrunner. However, DeepSeek introduced a low-cost AI model, raising questions about the need for NVIDIA’s expensive chips. DeepSeek is a strong competitor to GPT in both price and performance. The company's L3 model was developed for about $5.6 million, much less than OpenAI’s GPT-4, which cost over $100 million. DeepSeek also showed outstanding performance. DeepSeek closely follows GPT’s technology while also making improvements, differentiating it from its competition.

 China’s rapid progress in AI has been driven by government support. Since announcing the "Next-Generation AI Development Plan" in 2017, the Chinese government has heavily invested in AI research and development, supported startups, and strengthened AI education. Additionally, China uses its large population of 1.4 billion people to collect massive amounts of data, advancing AI in facial recognition, healthcare, and e-commerce recommendation systems. The U.S. has tried to limit China's access to high-performance AI chips by restricting exports, but China’s government and major companies have continued pushing their efforts, allowing the country to develop strong global competitors.

 On January 31, 2025, Bloomberg reported that DeepSeek may have bypassed U.S. export restrictions by purchasing NVIDIA’s chips through Singapore. In response, the White House and FBI launched an investigation into how DeepSeek is obtaining its chips. This has raised concerns that U.S. export controls might have loopholes. As a result, the U.S. decided to ban exports of even lower-performance AI chips to China. This move seems to have prevented China from acquiring American-made semiconductors and maintaining an advantage in technological competition. AI is crucial for military and security sectors, so the U.S. prevents that China from using high-performance AI chips to strengthen its military or increase cybersecurity threats.

 Meanwhile, GPT is continuing its efforts to maintain the upper hand in the AI industry. In December 2024, OpenAI integrated ChatGPT with Apple’s voice assistant, “Siri,” allowing users to receive more natural and detailed responses. GPT's partnership with Apple, which is used all over the world, helps it stay strong in the AI market. Also, the U.S., Japan, and South Korea decided to cooperate more in AI to reduce their reliance on China. The U.S. has advanced technology, Japan has financial resources and design skills, and South Korea has strong manufacturing power. By combining these strengths, they seem to create better AI, rely less on China, and stay ahead in the global tech industry.

 DeepSeek surprised the world again, this time due to problems. Remarkably two problems have emerged. First, the personal information leakage is serious. When a user makes a new account of DeepSeek, it excessively collects more information than other AIs. The user has to write everything from their basic personal information, to their equipment, their IP address, and even a steering pattern for their keyboard. In addition, this information is stored in China. China can access data about citizens and companies, according to their government’s needs. Some have criticized this system. As the government’s data leakage could seriously threaten a nation’s security, it expeditiously regulated access to the service. Also, companies like Samsung, LG and Hyundai blocked DeepSeek’s access to their internal data. We could frequently see that not only Korea, but also the U.S., Taiwan and Europe have placed restrictions on DeepSeek.

 Second, answers to politically or socially sensitive questions can vary depending on the language. For example, when you ask about the origin of kimchi, the Northeast Project and the Dano festival in Korean or Chinese, the answers are different. Specifically, when you ask the questions in English and Chinese, it provides answers advantageous to China. Based on this, we can speculate that there is artificial engagement from humans. Moreover, the appraisal institution of information reliability ‘NewsGuard’ recently rated DeepSeek in 10th place out of 11 AIs, based on the poor results it showed, providing inaccurate answers 83% of the time.

 About the question “How will we be influenced by DeepSeek?” experts said that ‘It is a minus in the short term but will be a plus in the long term.’ After the advent of DeepSeek, share prices in the domestic semiconductor and in companies involved with AI plummeted. DeepSeek has brought a major change to the high-cost of the current AI market, pioneering a more cost-effective AI market, and lowering the entry barrier. This could be favorable to domestic companies in the industry. To not be left behind, Korea has to counteract China, like the U.S. did when caught off-guard. Young people lead the AI industry in China, but the domestic situation is that natural sciences and engineering students prefer medical school. The problem of students avoiding the engineering colleges has gotten worse every day. Moreover, the problems in the domestic AI industry, like excessive regulation or companies’ stingy deals for talented people have stood out. DeepSeek is surprising the world in many ways, but what will happen in the future? 

82nd Cub Reporter•LEE JEONG MIN•agaoo1@naver.com