DeepSeek | Pakistan

The US State Department has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it says are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including AI startup DeepSeek, to steal intellectual property from US artificial intelligence labs, according to a diplomatic cable seen by Reuters. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models”. “A separate demarche request and message has been sent to Beijing for raising with China,” the document states. Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones as part of an effort to lower the costs of training a powerful new AI tool. This week, the White House made similar accusations. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that DeepSeek was targeting the ChatGPT maker and the nation’s l...

Chinese startup DeepSeek released a new artificial intelligence model with “drastically reduced” costs on Friday, more than a year after it stunned the world with a low-cost reasoning model that matched the capabilities of US rivals. The AI race has intensified the rivalry between China and the United States, and the White House on Thursday accused Chinese entities of a massive effort to steal artificial intelligence technology. Hangzhou-based DeepSeek burst onto the scene in January last year with a generative AI chatbot, powered by its R1 reasoning model, that upended assumptions of US dominance in the strategic sector. The new version, DeepSeek-V4, “features an ultra-long context of one million words”, the company said in a statement on social media platform WeChat, hailing it as “world-leading… with drastically reduced compute (and) memory costs” in a separate announcement on X. The model’s context length, which determines how much input a model is able to absorb to help it complete tasks, “(achieves) lea...

Germany’s data protection commissioner has asked Apple and Google to remove Chinese AI startup DeepSeek from their app stores in the country due to concerns about data protection. Commissioner Meike Kamp said in a statement on Friday that she made the request because DeepSeek illegally transfers users’ personal data to China. The two US tech giants must now review the request promptly and decide whether to block the app in Germany, she added. DeepSeek did not respond to a request for comment. Apple and Google were not immediately available for comment. According to its own privacy policy, DeepSeek stores numerous personal data, such as requests to its AI programme or uploaded files, on computers in China. “DeepSeek has not been able to provide my agency with convincing evidence that German users’ data is protected in China to a level equivalent to that in the European Union,” Kamp said. “Chinese authorities have far-reaching access rights to personal data within the sphere of influence of Chinese companies,” ...