How the U.S. chip bans led to a monster called DeepSeek

Barred from using powerful chips, researchers outside the U.S. were forced to find ways of training and operating AI models using less memory and computing power. 

The Chinese AI company DeepSeek has put the AI industry in an uproar. Denied the most powerful chips thought needed to create state-of-the-art AI models, DeepSeek pulled off some engineering master strokes that allowed the researchers to do more with less. The DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1 models the company recently released achieved state-of-the-art performance in benchmark tests and cost much less time and money to train and operate than comparable models.