Beijing – DeepSeek is a Chinese startup that has surprised the world with its low-cost artificial intelligence model. 2025released in April twenty four preview of The long-awaited new model It is adapted to Huawei’s chip technology, underscoring China’s growing autonomy in this field.
According to DeepSeek, the Pro version of the new model outperforms other open source models on the World Knowledge Benchmark, trailing only Google’s closed source Gemini-Pro-3.1.
The close collaboration with Huawei on the new V4 model stands in contrast to DeepSeek’s past reliance on Nvidia AI chips. Huawei said its chips were used for part of V4’s training process.
“This is a big deal for China’s AI industry,” he said. M.S. said He Hui, director of semiconductor research at consultancy Omdia.
“Huawei’s Ascend chips are the country’s best domestic alternative to Nvidia, and support for DeepSeek V4 shows that China’s top AI models can run on Chinese hardware.”
Most major AI models are trained and run on chips made by Nvidia. And DeepSeek’s pivot to Huawei underscores concerns from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang that American companies risk losing their developer ecosystem in China due to U.S. export controls and Beijing’s push for self-sufficiency.
“The day Deep Seek first appears on Huawei, that’s a terrible outcome for our country,” Huang said on the podcast. April.
Lewis Tunstall, machine learning engineer at Hugging Face, says V4 is the fastest model to take the top spot on Hugging Face, a popular developer forum for sharing and running machine learning models.
It’s great at handling very long and complex text tasks, and it’s much cheaper to run than competing top models, but it does have some limitations. For example, multiple modalities such as images and video are not supported, Tunstall said.
DeepSeek’s success has drawn criticism from the U.S. government and America’s rivals. Inappropriate use of American know-how.
Meanwhile, DeepSeek has acknowledged the use of Nvidia chips, but has not said whether those chips are subject to an export ban. The company also said it did not intentionally use synthetic data generated by OpenAI.
Released in April twenty four The announcement came a day after the White House accused China of stealing intellectual property from U.S. AI labs on an industrial scale. Visit of US President Donald Trump to Beijing May The purpose was to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
The Trump administration gave the green light in January to sell Nvidia’s powerful H200 chip in China, but shipments have been hampered by disagreements over terms of sale in both China and the United States, officials said.
Chinese chipmakers rose on hopes for greater adoption of domestically produced chips, with Huahong Semiconductor and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. up 15% and 10%, respectively.
NVIDIA stock also rose after Intel predicted unexpectedly strong revenue and profits, reinforcing confidence that the AI boom shows no signs of slowing down.
Many Western countries and some Asian governments have banned the use of DeepSeek by their agencies and officials, citing data privacy concerns. Nevertheless, DeepSeek’s models have always been most popular on international platforms hosting open source models.
In China, despite its meteoric rise to national champion status; 2025its lead evaporated amid numerous competitive offerings from domestic rivals. The release of V4 caused rival companies’ stock prices to plummet, with Zhipu AI and MiniMax both down 9%.
Deepseek said in April: twenty four V4 may be particularly suited to the work of AI agents, which can perform more complex tasks than chatbots but require more computing power.
How successful it will be remains to be seen.
“My initial take is that the DeepSeek V4 preview looks significant, but until there is independent evaluation and more real-world developer testing, I would be cautious about taking the benchmark headlines at face value,” said Daniel Dewhurst, an AI engineer who tested V4 after its release.
Notably, however, V4 shows that open models that people can use and run themselves appear to be further closing the gap with closed models, especially when it comes to cost, long context, and coding, he said.
It can handle over a million tokens, comparable to OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 or Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 context window, but requires only a fraction of the “computation”.
V4 also has a lower cost Flash version. Preview versions allow companies to incorporate real-world feedback and make changes prior to final product launch. DeepSeek did not say when the model is expected to be completed.
DeepSeek, owned by China’s Highflyer Capital Management, is aiming to raise funding at a valuation of more than US$20 billion (S$25.5 billion), The Information reported. AprilHe also said that tech giants Alibaba and Tencent were in talks to acquire stakes. Reuters
