DeepSeek, the Chinese AI start-up that recently gained global recognition, has temporarily suspended developer top-ups for its platform due to high demand. On Thursday, the company disabled the top-up button on its website, citing “server resource constraints” while assuring users that existing balances remain usable.
DeepSeek’s platform enables developers to integrate its artificial intelligence models through APIs, providing access to its cutting-edge technology. The company’s rapid rise in popularity followed the release of its V3 large language model (LLM) and R1 reasoning model, which are said to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT but at a fraction of the cost.
LLMs are trained to understand human language and generate responses, while reasoning models focus on logical inference tasks. DeepSeek’s chatbot, launched on January 10, quickly amassed over 22 million daily active users (DAUs) by the end of the month, second only to ChatGPT’s 53 million DAUs, according to market tracker Aicpb.com.
The company’s developer platform has also seen significant interest, offering its V3 model at a discounted rate of $0.28 per 1 million output tokens, compared to the original price of $1.1. Even at full price, this remains far below OpenAI’s GPT-4o model, which costs $10 per 1 million tokens but offers a longer context length. Context length refers to the number of tokens a model can process at one time, influencing its ability to understand and generate coherent responses.
Major Chinese cloud service providers, including Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei, have made DeepSeek’s V3 and R1 models available on their platforms, further expanding its reach. The company’s growing reputation has also influenced investor sentiment, prompting a reassessment of China’s tech sector, which trades at significantly lower valuations compared to US giants like Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft.
The Hang Seng Tech Index, which includes companies such as Tencent, Alibaba, and Xiaomi, has climbed over 10% in the past two weeks, reaching a near four-month high. The broader Hang Seng Index has also gained around 6% during the same period.
Despite its success, DeepSeek remains tight-lipped about its future plans. On Wednesday, the company declined to comment when approached by journalists and job seekers following the Lunar New Year break. Meanwhile, two unrelated companies bearing similar names—Deepseek Limited and Deepseek (HK) Limited—were registered in Hong Kong, but there is no confirmed connection between them and the AI start-up.
As demand for DeepSeek’s AI models continues to grow, the company faces the challenge of scaling its operations while maintaining accessibility for developers and users worldwide.
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