DeepSeek: How China's AI app stunned Silicon Valley
Newshour
BBC
4.4 • 984 Ratings
🗓️ 28 January 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The emergence of DeepSeek's artificial intelligence model has triggered shockwaves on Wall Street. Shares in major tech firms such as Nvidia fell sharply, with the chip giant losing almost $600bn in market value. Investors are questioning the high valuation and dominance of some established US firms. DeepSeek's AI model was developed for much less. We go to Beijing to learn more.
Also in the programme: The United Nations says hospitals are overwhelmed, treating hundreds of injured people in Goma in eastern Congo where Rwandan-backed M23 rebels are trying to capture the city from the Congolese army; plus the backstory of how Tetris became one of our most beloved computer games.
(Photo: DeepSeek logo and Chinese flag are seen in this illustration taken, January 28, 2025. Credit: Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to NewsHour on the BBC World Service. I'm Celia Hatton, coming to you live from London. |
| 0:09.6 | Happy Lunar New Year's Eve to all who celebrate, and it really is a happy New Year for one Chinese company, |
| 0:16.5 | the startup behind the artificial intelligence chatbot Deepseek. We're used to hearing about the |
| 0:22.8 | eccentric side projects of billionaire entrepreneurs, Tesla's Elon Musk, and Amazon's Jeff |
| 0:28.9 | Bezos have both made significant investments in space technology, for instance. But it's the |
| 0:34.3 | Deep Seek chatbot, a quiet side project from a Chinese tech billionaire that's upending financial markets and posing a lot of uncomfortable questions in Washington and also Beijing today. |
| 0:47.7 | It's the brainchild of young entrepreneur Liang Wenfong, described by partners as a very nerdy guy with a terrible hairstyle. |
| 0:56.6 | He made his money by training AI to make financial investments. |
| 1:01.4 | But on the side, he was creating Deepseek, |
| 1:04.3 | a remarkably powerful AI chatbot that's overtaken much pricier US competitors. |
| 1:10.8 | And it's been getting an overwhelming thumbs up by reviewers. |
| 1:15.3 | Emergency podcast, everybody. |
| 1:16.7 | The markets went crazy today due to the Deep Seek phenomenon. |
| 1:20.1 | We had to break our production schedules. |
| 1:21.7 | We set down the team meeting, everything. |
| 1:24.0 | Yeah, yeah. |
| 1:24.9 | Well, let me just cut to the chase. |
| 1:26.4 | I spent about 30-hour coding with |
| 1:28.9 | DeepSeek v3 as my primary LLM, and it is probably the best AI coding assistant I've ever used. |
| 1:37.8 | This development has been described as nothing less than a Sputnik moment by Mark Andreessen, |
| 1:42.2 | and for good reason, just as the launch of Sputnik challenged assumptions about American technological dominance in the 20th century, |
| 1:49.2 | DeepSeek R1 is forcing a reckoning in the 21st. |
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