The Chinese DeepSeek is making American tech companies tremble with fear after the launch of its own free AI tool, which is capable of directly competing with ChatGPT.
The company’s CEO, Liang Wenfeng, created DeepSeek in the city of Hangzhou, China, with profits from his successful financial business, although some skeptics question how large the role of the Chinese state has been in the company’s rapid development.
Wenfeng, who according to Chinese media reports just turned 40, launched his app in the United States on the same day as Donald Trump’s inauguration. Now, companies in Silicon Valley fear that DeepSeek could seize trillions from the global technology market value.
A “nerd” of mathematics who aimed to create human-level AI, Liang had told his colleagues about his plans early in his career, but none of his business partners believed much in his ambitions.
The current CEO of DeepSeek has never been motivated by money, according to friends, but has always hoped to gain respect in the tech world dominated by the US. Trump even praised China’s move in the “AI race” as a warning for the US to “wake up.”
However, experts emphasize that the US and the UK, which have already expressed concerns about Chinese apps like TikTok in the past, really should remain alert to the level of involvement of the Chinese government in receiving data from DeepSeek‘s AI.
“Just like TikTok, DeepSeek has the ability to collect vast amounts of sensitive data, all vulnerable to state interference,” explained Luke de Pulford, director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, to MailOnline.
“In addition to data protection violations, this gives the Communist Party a strategic advantage – they can process and analyze intimate information about hundreds of millions of foreign citizens.”
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