DeepSeek
A Chinese lab matches frontier reasoning models at a fraction of the cost and gives the weights away.
- When
- Known to
- ± 12 hours
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
- Where
- Hangzhou, China · 30.2741° N, 120.1551° E
DeepSeek released R1 on 20 January 2025, claiming training costs of a few million dollars against the hundreds of millions assumed necessary. On 27 January Nvidia lost about 600 billion dollars of market value in a day, the largest single-company loss in history. The result undercut the premise that frontier AI required both enormous capital and American chips, and export controls were revisited on both sides.