DeepSeek AI is sending shockwaves throughout the tech world

Where did DeepSeek come from?

The Hangzhou, China-based company was founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, an information and electronics engineer and graduate of Zhejiang University. It was part of the incubation program of High-Flyer, a fund Liang founded in 2015. Liang, like other leading names in the industry, aims to reach the level of “artificial general intelligence” that can catch up or surpass humans in various tasks.

DeepSeek’s journey began in November 2023 with the launch of DeepSeek Coder, an open-source model designed for coding tasks. This was followed by DeepSeek LLM, which aimed to compete with other major language models. DeepSeek-V2, released in May 2024, gained traction due to its strong performance and low cost. It also forced other major Chinese tech giants such as ByteDance, Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba to lower the prices of their AI models.

One of the main reasons DeepSeek has managed to attract attention is that it is free for end users. This is the first such advanced AI system available to users for free. Other powerful systems such as OpenAI o1 and Claude Sonnet require a paid subscription. Even some subscriptions impose quotas on users. Users can access the DeepSeek chat interface developed for the end user at “chat.deepseek”. It is enough to enter commands on the chat screen and press the “search” button to search the internet.

What has the reaction to DeepSeek been?

Alexandr Wang, CEO of ScaleAI, which provides training data to AI models of major players such as OpenAI and Google, described DeepSeek’s product as “an earth-shattering model” in a speech at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos on January 20-24, 2025.

While DeepSeek has stunned American rivals, analysts are already warning about what its release will mean in the West. “We should be alarmed. Chinese AI technology integrating further into the UK and Western society is not just a bad idea — it’s a reckless one,” Ross Burley, Co-Founder of the Centre for Information Resilience, said.

Philippine govt agencies warn public vs AI chatbots

The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) and Department of Science and Technology (DOST) are urging Filipino cyber geeks and netizens to be wary of engaging with artificial intelligence chatbots, following worldwide disruption caused by a Chinese AI startup. DICT Secretary Ivan John Uy said, at a forum in January 2025, that people should be “more discerning” in engaging with AI chatbots regardless of who developed the bot, especially with the details these machines disclose.

Australia bans DeepSeek AI program on govt devices

Australia has banned DeepSeek from all government devices on the advice of security agencies, a top official said Wednesday (Feb 5, 2025), citing privacy and malware risks posed by China’s breakout AI program. The DeepSeek chatbot — developed by a China-based startup — has astounded industry insiders and upended financial markets since it was released in January (2025). But a growing list of countries including South Korea, Italy and France have voiced concerns about the application’s security and data practices. Government cyber security envoy Andrew Charlton said: “We don’t want to expose government systems to these applications.”