Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has announced that it is temporarily restricting the registration of new users due to "large-scale malicious attacks" on its services. At the same time, the company assured that existing users will be able to continue using the platform without changes, CNBC reports.
The announcement comes as DeepSeek's DeepSeek-R1 language model is rapidly growing in popularity and becoming a serious competitor to industry leaders such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. DeepSeek AI Assistant has recently become the most downloaded free app in the US App Store, surpassing ChatGPT, which has generated significant interest in the company.
Founded in 2023, DeepSeek has quickly gained prominence in the AI community for its large language models (LLMs) and focus on developing artificial general intelligence (AGI). The release of the DeepSeek-R1 model last week came as a shock to many Silicon Valley companies, in particular because of the allegedly significantly lower cost of training the model, which, despite the US export restrictions on AI chips, proved to be able to compete with products from US companies. DeepSeek-R1 has been praised for its ability to think logically and solve complex problems, but the model has also been criticized for its built-in censorship of topics sensitive to the Chinese government.
DeepSeek has not yet provided any details about the cyberattack, the possible perpetrators, or their motives.