Seattle Times, carrying the AP report: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/stock-market-today-asian-markets-are-mixed-after-wall-street-edges-back-from-its-record/
Headline of ST item:
Tech stocks tumble as a Chinese competitor threatens to upend the AI industry; Nvidia down 16%
These AI plungers surely are a nervous bunch.
Is it real? As real as crypto? If not as real, at least as touchy-volatile; not your stable bluechip public utility stock, or moving in sync with federal bonds.
It appears a Chinese successful trading company is self-financing DeepSeek, open source, not with a closed source moat as OpenAI operates despite its name, while Memphis must assure it has enough electric power for plans of saluting-Elon and his xAI biggie.
So far, who is on board, in China or elsewhere? Other big China tech firms are putting out copy cat AI and chat offerings; but - big there -DeepSeek is cutting price. With other Chinese firms following with their pricing.
The AP item which ST published states -
The S&P 500 was down 1.7% in afternoon trading and heading for its worst day in more than a month. Big Tech stocks took some of the heaviest losses, with Nvidia down 16%, and they dragged the Nasdaq composite down 3.2%.
Stocks outside of AI-related industries held up much better, though, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 137 points, or 0.3%, as of 12:42 p.m. Eastern time. The Dow has much less of an emphasis on tech than the S&P 500 and Nasdaq.
The shock to financial markets came from China, where a company called DeepSeek said it had developed a large language model that can compete with U.S. giants but at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek had already hit the top of the chart for free apps on Apple’s App Store by Monday morning, and analysts said such a feat would be particularly impressive given how the U.S. government has restricted Chinese access to top AI chips.
Skepticism, though, remains about how much DeepSeek’s announcement will ultimately shake the AI supply chain, from the chip makers making semiconductors to the utilities hoping to electrify vast data centers gobbling up computing power.
“It remains to be seen if DeepSeek found a way to work around these chip restrictions rules and what chips they ultimately used as there will be many skeptics around this issue given the information is coming from China,” according to Dan Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities.
DeepSeek’s disruption nevertheless rocked AI-related stocks worldwide.
There are a number of recent papers on arXiv authored out of DeepSeek, and web search will uncover popular reporting. Heating up things is not for the nervous.
Nor is crypto. The beat goes on. AI promises, but does it deliver?
UPDATE: Seattle Times carries (no paywall) a Bloomberg feed re DeepSeek.
I want to call it DeepSleep, which is what we all need to stay healthy.
FURTHER: This is for friend Hegseth, who presumably has suitable advisers, possibly even the author of that Aug 2004 item where DeepSeek gets mention in a chart, but nothing like the recognition it is earning today.
That paper, on a brief scan, shows how AI open sourcing has some folks worried.
All for now.