Khaberni - A full year has passed since the moment that shook the technology world, when the emerging Chinese company DeepSeek launched its AI model R1 on January 20, 2025, creating a transformation that changed the game rules in an industry dominated by American companies.
The company, based in Hangzhou, managed to develop an advanced artificial intelligence system using less efficient chips and on a limited budget, challenging the American restrictions imposed on technology exports from China.
Donald Trump described this achievement as a "wake-up call" for the American technology industry, likening its impact to the historic "Sputnik" moment when the Soviet Union launched the first satellite in 1957.
Open-source strategy breaks monopoly
DeepSeek adopted a different approach than its American competitors, making its research and models available for commercial use at a low cost or for free, while companies like OpenAI and Anthropic imposed strict restrictions on access to their technologies, classifying China among the "unsupported" countries, alongside Russia and North Korea.
The success of the Chinese company prompted competitors to join the open-source movement, even Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, admitted in February, that his company "was on the wrong side of history" and needed a different strategy.
Boom in global adoption
Data from the global "OpenRouter" platform showed a significant increase in the use of Chinese models, where their share jumped from 1.2% weekly to nearly a third in some weeks.
The use of DeepSeek models exceeded more than 14 trillion tokens, outperforming the total usages of the next four models from companies Alibaba, Mistral AI, Meta, and OpenAI combined.
Major Chinese companies such as Alibaba, Moonshot, Zibo, and Mini Max launched AI models that attracted global interest, benefiting from DeepSeek's momentum and adopting more flexible licenses that facilitate their integration into commercial products, according to the "scmp" site.
Restoring investor confidence
The impact of DeepSeek transcended the technical aspects to reach the financial markets, after some investors considered the Chinese market "uninvestable" due to Beijing's anti-monopoly campaign and American restrictions, the emergence of the company proved the innovation capabilities of Chinese companies despite the challenges, restoring confidence to investors and shining a new light on Chinese companies.
Experts are anticipating the launch of a new model from DeepSeek around the Lunar New Year, with expected improvements in logical thinking and multimedia processing capabilities, as the company's journey that began a year ago in reshaping the future of global artificial intelligence continues.
