DeepSeek’s ’Dragon’ AI Stumbles in Comeback Show—Investors Left Wanting More
After months of radio silence, DeepSeek's flagship 'Dragon' AI botched its big return—delivering lackluster performance that sent tech circles buzzing. The much-hyped system, once touted as a ChatGPT killer, now faces skepticism from developers and backers alike.
Subheader: The Hype vs. The Reality
Promised breakthroughs in reasoning and creativity? Barely noticeable. Market-moving potential? More like market-yawn-inducing. While the team claims 'iterative progress,' early adopters report glitchy outputs and recycled responses—hardly the moonshot promised in last year's whitepaper.
Subheader: Silicon Valley's Short Memory
VCs who poured nine figures into DeepSeek now face the oldest lesson in tech: demo-day dazzle rarely translates to real-world dominance. But hey—at least the burn rate buys nice office kombucha. Meanwhile, rivals like Anthropic and xAI keep shipping while Dragon plays catch-up.
Closing thought: In AI as in crypto, you can't hype a product to competence. Either it delivers—or joins the graveyard of overfunded also-rans.
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Pessimistic View
DeepSeek, which rocked the U.S. tech world earlier this year with a model which outgunned their capabilities but at a cheaper price, sent along a senior researcher to a Chinese-government organised internet conference.
Chen Deli took the stage alongside the chief executives of five other companies including Unitree and BrainCo at the World Internet Conference in the city of Wuzhen, in the eastern province of Zhejiang. The six companies together are known in China as “six little dragons” for AI.
Deli served up a pessimistic view about AI’s future impact on humanity. He said AI could be a great aid to humans as it improved over the short term, but that it could threaten job losses in the next 5 to 10 years as it becomes good enough to take over some of the work humans perform.
He urged fellow AI firms to be aware of these risks.
“In the next 10-20 years, AI could take over the rest of work (humans perform) and society could face a massive challenge, so at the time tech companies need to take the role of ‘defender’,” he said. “I’m extremely positive about the technology but I view the impact it could have on society negatively.”
AI Race
This marked the first public appearance for the firm since founder and CEO Liang Wenfeng met Chinese President Xi Jinping at a televised meeting with local entrepreneurs in February.
Neither Liang or the company have commented publicly on their success and they have skipped major Chinese technology conferences in the country in the months since. But its impact continues unveiling, in September an upgrade to its V3 model, which it described as its latest “experimental” version that is more efficient to train and better at processing long sequences of text than previous iterations.
In addition, Chinese AI chip companies including Cambricon and Huawei have developed hardware compatible with DeepSeek’s models.
DeepSeek has also in many ways been seen as the poster child of Chinese AI as the country tries to battle the U.S. and companies such as Nvidia (NVDA) and Alphabet (GOOGL) for top spot in the technological race.
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