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Artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek rattled the industry earlier this year — but its founder is reportedly not interested in bringing in outside capital just yet.
DeepSeek’s founder Liang Wenfeng isn’t rushing to find investors who would interfere with his control and the company’s decisions, the Wall Street Journal (NWSA-1.17%) reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter. Liang reportedly also is wary of stakeholders involved with the government due to fears that it could hamper DeepSeek’s global efforts.
Since its AI models sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley and Wall Street in January, DeepSeek has received interest from China’s tech giants, including Tencent (TCEHY+2.40%) and Alibaba (BABA+5.14%), over potential collaborations, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company has also reportedly been offered a low-interest loan from the state-owned Bank of China (BACHY+0.76%).
After DeepSeek released results in January demonstrating that its open-source reasoning models, DeepSeek-R1, can perform comparably to those from OpenAI on several industry benchmarks, it sparked a global sell-off of tech stocks. In December, the company released its DeepSeek-V3 models, which it said cost just $5.6 million to train and develop on Nvidia (NVDA+3.21%) H800 chips — a reduced-capability version of the more powerful chips that U.S. firms have touted spending tens of billions of dollars on.
Amid the hype over R1, the mobile app for DeepSeek’s AI chatbot, also called DeepSeek, surged to the top of Apple’s (AAPL-2.74%) App Store downloads. The DeepSeek site experienced outages due to the influx of new users, and the company had to issue a temporary limit on registrations after “large-scale malicious attacks.”
Since then, DeepSeek has continued to experience service outages from an overabundance of users, and has come under scrutiny by the U.S. and other countries over data security risks.
Last month, DeepSeek published its techniques for training its AI models with the H800 chips, and is planning an April release for its next reasoning model, the Wall Street Journal reported. DeepSeek’s AI models are currently mostly available for free.
Before its success, DeepSeek had sought venture capital funding, but was turned down, the Wall Street Journal reported. Now, the company is reportedly looking to work with larger tech firms to develop commercial AI applications.