BEIJING: Chinese startup DeepSeek said on Monday it will temporarily limit registrations due to a cyberattack after the company’s AI assistant amassed sudden popularity.
The startup earlier in the day was also hit by outages on its website after its AI assistant became the top-rated free application available on Apple’s App Store in the United States.
The company resolved issues relating to its application programming interface and users’ inability to log in to the website, according to its status page.
The outages on Monday were the company’s longest in around 90 days and coincides with its sky-rocketing popularity.
DeepSeek last week launched a free assistant it says uses less data at a fraction of the cost of incumbent players’ models, possibly marking a turning point in the level of investment needed for AI.
Powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, which its creators say “tops the leaderboard among open-source models and rivals the most advanced closed-source models globally”, the artificial intelligence application has surged in popularity among US users since it was released on Jan. 10, according to app data research firm Sensor Tower.
The milestone highlights how DeepSeek has left a deep impression on Silicon Valley, upending widely held views about US primacy in AI and the effectiveness of Washington’s export controls targeting China’s advanced chip and AI capabilities.
Technology stocks were hammered on Monday, sending the shares of Nvidia and Oracle plummeting.
AI models from ChatGPT to DeepSeek require advanced chips to power their training. The Biden administration has since 2021 widened the scope of bans designed to stop these chips from being exported to China and used to train Chinese firms’ AI models.
However, DeepSeek researchers wrote in a paper last month that the DeepSeek-V3 used Nvidia’s H800 chips for training, spending less than $6 million.
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