DeepSeek is an underdog Chinese A.I. start-up company that seems to be disrupting the American A.I. industry in a matter of months with a fraction of the cost. Folks online are now posting DeepSeek memes poking fun at the American A.I. industry in response.
What is DeepSeek and what does it do?
DeepSeek is a start-up company based in China that recently published a 22-page paper claiming that they have created a new A.I. model (called DeepSeek-R1) that uses “a modest number of second-rate A.I. chips,” according to the New York Times, and can match the performance of its American counterparts at a fraction of the price that these U.S.-based companies are paying.
The DeepSeek A.I. Assistant app exploded in popularity in late Jan. 2025, and as one person on X, formerly known as Twitter, pointed out, “Update: Deepseek is now number 1 on the app store, across all categories.”
@RnaudBertrand went on, “Quite literally, China has now officially taken the lead in AI. Ironically 3 days after Trump signed an executive order ‘to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance’”
Another important difference between DeepSeek’s A.I. and those based in the United States is that it was released as open-source software versus closed-source, which is worrying many in the tech industry, as this enables anyone with a working knowledge of code to see how the A.I. works and use it themselves.
Who is behind DeepSeek?
DeepSeek’s founder is 39-year-old Liang Wenfeng, who doesn’t seem to have a large public persona like many tech founders in the United States. According to an article published by Reuters, Wenfeng has always been a supporter of open-source coding, as he said in an interview in 2024, “Even if OpenAI is closed-source, it cannot stop others from catching up…Open-source is like a cultural practice, rather than a business practice…a company that does this will have soft power.”
Why are Americans freaking out about DeepSeek?
American companies are panicking over DeepSeek’s foray into the A.I. marketplace, and news of the open-source software has led to a drastic drop in the stock market for many tech companies.
Many people are questioning if this is the end of an era for American tech giants. On Monday, Jan. 27, 2025, Nvidia was hit the hardest, its index nosediving 16.9 percent, which equates to around $600 billion in market value. Nasdaq and the S&P 500 also fell, but not to the extreme of Nvidia.
The best DeepSeek memes
Netizens are doing what they do best when there is turmoil: they are posting memes about it. Below are some of the funniest DeepSeek memes around the internet.
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