DeepSeek’s advances have roiled global stock markets and AI players. Now, its influence is spreading quickly at home, with some of China’s biggest tech companies, many of which had been developing their own chatbots, racing to incorporate the open-source model into their own services.
In early February telecoms giant Huawei said it would run DeepSeek on its own computing hardware composed of its Ascend computer processors, which are domestically produced.
Some AI watchers have hailed this as a turning point, as it demonstrates that a high-performing model like DeepSeek no longer requires Nvidia’s most powerful chips to operate.
But the success of DeepSeek’s latest R1 AI model, which is said to be trained at a fraction of the cost of established players like ChatGPT, challenged the assumption that cutting off access to advanced chips could successfully stymie China’s progress.
