I noticed an interesting development story in the artificial intelligence field. DeepSeek is a Chinese company that has created a quite impressive product in a relatively short period of time. It was founded in May 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, who was previously a co-founder of the hedge fund High-Flyer. It is based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province.

In January of this year, they released the chat application DeepSeek-R1 for iOS and Android, and what happened next — by the end of the month, it became the most downloaded free app on the App Store in the US, surpassing even ChatGPT. This is quite symbolic, if you think about it.

What’s interesting about their approach — they make their generative AI algorithms completely open-source. People can freely use, modify, and study their code. Plus, they actively seek young researchers from top Chinese universities and hire specialists from other fields to expand their models’ capabilities.

The market reacted quite intensely to this. Prices for AI models in China started to fall, and companies like ByteDance, Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba had to lower their prices to stay competitive. But here’s the paradox — despite the low prices, DeepSeek remains profitable, while their competitors are incurring losses.

The company is not rushing into commercialization yet, focusing solely on research. This allows their technologies to avoid the strictest provisions of Chinese AI regulations.

In a broader context, this appears to be a significant step forward in the development of high technology in Asian countries. Such examples help retain talent and reduce brain drain from countries like India and China. It will be interesting to see how this trend develops further.