DeepSeek's AI Surge Disrupts Tech Market & Sparks Cyberattack (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Chinese startup DeepSeek, whose new low-cost AI model rattled tech stocks Monday, suffered a large-scale cyber attack, causing it to temporarily limit registrations. Earlier in the day, DeepSeek said it was hit by outages on its website after its AI assistant became the top-rated free app in Apple's U.S. App Store and overtook ChatGPT in downloads. DeepSeek claims it uses cheaper chips and less data, challenging the idea that advanced semiconductors, like those made by NVIDIA, are needed to run AI applications. That sent major tech stocks tumbling, with shares of NVIDIA falling as much as 17.8 percent at one point Monday morning. Brian Jacobson is chief economist at Annex Wealth Management.

Speaker 2: This could really be a change in the script, a change in the narrative around artificial intelligence where it's no longer about what has been called the picks and shovels. That was like NVIDIA as far as with the chips that they were selling and maybe even the data center providers. Now it's moved on from the picks and the shovels more to perhaps the refiners and the jewelers in that narrative, where it's more about what's the actual use case of the technology.

Speaker 1: DeepSeek's popularity has also upended widely held views about U.S. dominance in the AI space and the effectiveness of Washington's export controls targeting China's advanced chip and AI capabilities. Little is known about the company behind DeepSeek, a small Hangzhou-based startup founded in 2023 when search engine giant Baidu released the first Chinese AI large-language model. Since then, dozens of Chinese tech companies large and small have released their own AI models, but DeepSeek is the first to be praised by the U.S. tech industry as matching or even surpassing the performance of cutting-edge U.S. models.