DeepSeek, China’s groundbreaking AI model, has made waves in the tech world, outshining major players like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude AI. In a stunning feat, the DeepSeek app shot to the top of the Apple App Store charts, knocking ChatGPT off its pedestal and making a significant impact on the US stock market. This sudden rise to prominence is largely attributed to the brilliant, young minds behind it, who, despite facing limited resources, have managed to develop AI technology that is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
A key figure in this success is Luo Fuli, a 29-year-old AI prodigy who has become a household name in China. A natural talent in the field of natural language processing (NLP), Luo has earned widespread recognition for her pioneering work. Her journey into the AI world began at Beijing Normal University, where she faced early struggles with computer science but eventually went on to excel. She later continued her studies at Peking University’s Institute of Computational Linguistics, where she made an impressive mark by publishing eight research papers at the prestigious ACL conference in 2019.
Her remarkable achievements caught the eye of some of China’s biggest tech companies, including Alibaba and Xiaomi, leading to key collaborations. At Alibaba’s DAMO Academy, Luo played a vital role in developing VECO, a multilingual pre-training model, and made significant contributions to the AliceMind project, which is open-source. It was in 2022 that Luo joined DeepSeek, bringing her NLP expertise with her. Her contributions were crucial in developing DeepSeek-V2, the AI chatbot that has earned rave reviews for its performance, often compared to that of ChatGPT.
Luo’s extraordinary abilities did not go unnoticed, even outside the company. Xiaomi’s founder, Lei Jun, was so impressed by her talents that he offered her a compensation package of 10 million yuan annually, according to the South China Morning Post.
Founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek is based in Hangzhou, China. Despite being a relatively new player in the field, DeepSeek has quickly positioned itself as a fierce competitor to global AI giants with its impressive large language models (LLMs), all developed at a fraction of the cost of its rivals. DeepSeek’s latest model, DeepSeek-V3, has earned comparisons to some of the most advanced LLMs in the world, including Llama 3.1 and Qwen 2.5, while delivering similar results to GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. This rapid advancement is down to DeepSeek’s innovative approach, which includes leveraging open-source models and low-cost hardware to achieve top-tier performance.
In terms of benchmarks, DeepSeek’s R1 model has outperformed OpenAI’s o1-mini model in a number of key areas. Research from Artificial Analysis has further shown that the R1 model surpasses those developed by major tech players like Google, Meta, and Anthropic in overall quality.
Since its launch, DeepSeek’s app has soared in popularity, becoming the most downloaded free app on the US App Store, surpassing even ChatGPT. This meteoric rise has caused a stir in the US tech market, with shares in AI-focused companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Meta all experiencing a drop in value as a result.
With the continued success of DeepSeek and the remarkable achievements of innovators like Luo Fuli, the future of AI looks set to be reshaped by this new force from China.