DeepSeek Goes Quiet For Lunar New Year After AI Shock

Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek may be attracting worldwide attention, but the company has reportedly gone quiet as China’s week-long Lunar New Year celebrations begin.

The start-up, founded in 2023, saw its app surge to the top of Apple’s free iPhone app downloads in the US over the weekend, putting a spotlight on DeepSeek’s low-cost AI models that it says perform as well or better than rivals from OpenAI, Anthropic and others.

DeepSeek’s success caused investors to question the billions that large tech firms have been spending on AI infrastructure over the past two years, causing tech stocks to tank and wiping a combined $94 billion (£75.5bn) off the fortunes of the world’s top tech tycoons, according to Bloomberg calculations.

Week-long pause

Meanwhile, DeepSeek released a new family of AI image-generation models, Janus-Pro, at midnight on Monday before shutting down for the Lunar New Year holiday, traditionally a time for family reunions in China.

Tuesday through next Monday are public holidays in the country, with Tuesday being Lunar New Year’s Eve and Wednesday New Year’s Day, and the building in Hangzhou in eastern China where DeepSeek is headquartered was deserted on Tuesday, the South China Morning Post reported.

A security guard at the building said there had been numerous uninvited visitors over the past two days, with some knocking on the door as they tried to find out about the suddenly famous start-up.

Rather than a technology park, DeepSeek is headquartered in a high-rise whose tenants are mostly in the finance industry, the Post said.

High-Flyer Quant, the hedge fund owned by DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng that is the AI firm’s main backer, is also based in the same building.

Liang and DeepSeek’s staff, who are mostly young university graduates, have kept such a low profile that the company does not even have public relations staff, the report said.

‘Sputnik moment’

The company’s employees have reportedly been amazed at the worldwide response to DeepSeek’s models, which Marc Andreessen, a supporter of US president Donald Trump and a leading tech investor, called “one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen”.

Andreessen called DeepSeek’s R1, released last week, it a “Sputnik moment”, in reference to Soviet Russia’s launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957.

In an interview in July of last year with The China Academy, Liang said he, too, was surprised at the response to DeepSeek’s then-current model.

“We didn’t expect pricing to be such a sensitive issue. We were simply following our own pace, calculating costs, and setting prices accordingly,” he said.