DeepSeek hit by cyberattack, stops new user registrations

Making a splash with its low-cost AI model, China's DeepSeek quickly saw a new wave of users wanting to experience "delicious, nutritious, cheap" products but also suffered cyber attacks.

DeepSeek login interface - Photo: AFP

In a late announcement on January 27, DeepSeek said it would temporarily restrict new user registrations due to a cyber attack.

Earlier in the day, the Chinese startup was taken offline after its AI assistant became the highest-rated free app on Apple's App Store in the US.

According to Reuters, this was the company's longest outage in about 90 days and coincided with a period of intense global attention. DeepSeek later announced that it had resolved issues related to its application programming interface and users being unable to log in to the site.

Last week, DeepSeek launched a free assistant based on its DeepSeek-V3 model, which it touts as a fraction of the cost of existing AI models. Some believe this could be a tipping point in the level of investment needed for AI.

AI models from ChatGPT to DeepSeek require advanced chips to power their training, and since 2021, the Biden administration has expanded the scope of a ban designed to block the export of these chips to China.

However, in a report last month, DeepSeek researchers said that DeepSeek-V3 used Nvidia's H800 chip to train the AI, at a cost of less than $6 million.

DeekSeek is open source based

Little is known about the company behind DeepSeek other than that it is a small Hangzhou-based startup founded in 2023. It is headed by Guangdong-born Liang Wenfeng, a co-founder of the High-Flyer fund that invested in DeepSeek.

Dozens of Chinese tech companies, large and small, have released their own AI models, but DeepSeek is the first to be hailed by the US tech industry as equal to, or even superior to, the performance of other existing AI models.

DeepSeek claims their AI model is open source, unlike existing AI models that are based on closed source code.

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/deepseek-bi-tan-cong-mang-ngung-cho-dang-ky-nguoi-dung-moi-20250128095052645.htm