DeepSeek’s overnight fame strains its systems, draws attacks

By the end of the weekend, DeepSeek’s AI assistant had rocketed to the top of Apple Inc.’s iPhone download charts and ranked among the top downloads on Google’s Play Store, straining the startup’s systems so much that the service went down for more than an hour. — AP Photo/Andy Wong

Talk of an artificial-intelligence upstart in China behind a formidable ChatGPT rival had been building for days.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, some mentioned Hangzhou-based DeepSeek and its recently released R1 model as a prime reason for countries such as the US to be doubling down on AI advancements. On tech chat boards, engineers had begun comparing its programming performance to leading models from the likes of OpenAI and Microsoft Corp. Its product quietly rose through the ranks of top performers on a UC Berkeley-affiliated AI leaderboard.