One week after launch, a Chinese LLM topped App Store charts and tanked Nvidia stock – with training costs that make OpenAI blush.
Nvidia stock dipped hard in early 2025 when DeepSeek-R1, a ChatGPT rival, skyrocketed to #1 on App Store downloads in just seven days. Now entering 2026, it’s redefining cost-efficient AI.[2]
DeepSeek (Jan 2025) leverages Chain of Thought Reasoning and distillation from Llama/Qwen for top performance at a fraction of US model costs – less compute, smarter training. SpikingBrain adds brain-like ‘spiking’ neurons for power savings on long tasks.[2]
Dev teams: self-host this open-ish efficiency beast for RAG apps or agents without AWS bills killing margins. It rivals Grok/Gemini on benchmarks while running leaner – perfect for edge or startup scale.[2]
US has Meta/Google muscle, but China’s resource hacks expose Western bloat. Waymo leads AV, Mistral pushes Europe – yet DeepSeek proves distillation + CoT beats raw FLOPs. SpikingBrain hints at neuromorphic future vs. Transformers.[2]
Download DeepSeek-R1 weights, benchmark vs. your Llama fine-tune on HumanEval. Can the West match this cost curve before China owns inference?
Source: We Are Innovation