Shanghai, China, Jan 28 (EFE).- Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek has temporarily limited new user registrations after suffering «large-scale malicious attacks» just hours after triggering a sharp fall in US stocks.
«Due to large-scale malicious attacks on DeepSeek’s services, we are temporarily limiting registrations to ensure continued service. Existing users can log in as usual. Thanks for your understanding and support,» the company said on its status page.
The platform is «investigating the issue» that has caused its web and application programming interface (API) services to operate with «degraded performance,» it added.
DeepSeek has not yet specified the nature or origin of the attacks.
The huge interest in the AI app, launched in 2023 by a Chinese hedge fund and practically anonymous internationally until a few weeks ago, reached the new US president, Donald Trump, who said its sudden success should be a «wake-up call» for the US tech sector.
Trump said he still expected American tech companies to master artificial intelligence, but acknowledged the challenge posed by DeepSeek, which was the most downloaded app on the Apple Store over the weekend.
«The release of DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company should be a wake-up call for our industry,» the US president said Monday.
The emergence of DeepSeek’s AI model caused the New York’s Nasdaq exchange to fall by more than 3 percent, hitting the technology giant Nvidia (-16.9 percent) in particular, which suffered the biggest one-day fall for a listed company in history, estimated at around $600 billion.
Analysts say DeepSeek is a threat to the market because of its commitment to open source and its low costs: its developers claim that the latest model was trained for only 55 days with a budget of less than $6 million, much less than that of its US competitors.
«Deepseek’s R1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they’re able to deliver for the price. We will obviously deliver much better models and also it’s legit invigorating to have a new competitor! We will pull up some releases,» OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on X.
Apart from Nvidia, the impact of DeepSeek was felt by other tech companies such as Broadcom (-17 percent), AMD (-6.3 percent), Cisco (-5 percent), Palantir (-4.4 percent), Alphabet (-4.2 percent) and Microsoft (-2.14 percent), as well as energy-related companies such as Constellation Energy (-21 percent) and Vistra (-30 percent).
On Tuesday, with Chinese stock markets closed for the Lunar New Year, major Asian markets followed Wall Street’s lead and closed with losses, led by Tokyo’s Nikkei (-1.39 percent).
DeepSeek’s breakthrough came almost in parallel with the unveiling of the ‘Stargate Project’ in the US, which aims to invest around $500 billion over the next four years to build up to 20 new data centers to support AI initiatives in the country. EFE.
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