DeepSeek new model to test China’s AI ambitions
For weeks now, the global tech industry has been waiting for a major artificial intelligence (AI) launch from DeepSeek, seen as a benchmark for China’s progress in the fast-moving field.
More than a year has passed since the startup put Chinese AI on the map in early 2025 with a low-cost chatbot that performed at a similar level to US rivals.
But despite reports and rumors about its imminent release, DeepSeek’s next-generation “V4” model is nowhere in sight.
Speculation is also swirling over the geopolitical implications of which computer chips were chosen to train and power the new system: world-leading US designs or made-in-China alternatives that the country is racing to develop.
Tech news outlet The Information reported last week that V4 can be run on the latest chips made by China’s Huawei.
Milestone shift
Such a shift would mark a milestone for China in its bid to beat US restrictions on the export of top-of-the-range AI chips from Californian titan Nvidia to the country.
DeepSeek started life in 2023 as a side project of a hedge fund that had access to a cache of powerful Nvidia processors.
It shot to attention in January 2025 with its R1 deep-reasoning chatbot, which sent US tech shares tumbling with President Donald Trump calling it a “wake-up call” for American firms.
R1 was based on DeepSeek’s last major AI model, V3, which was released in December 2024.
The company’s affordable, customizable AI tools have been widely adopted in China, and are also popular in emerging markets such as Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
Stephen Wu, founder of the Carthage Capital fund, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that V4—said to be multimodal, meaning it can generate text, pictures, and video—could again shock US tech valuations.
“I expect the upcoming DeepSeek V4 release will not just be a software update; it will be a highly capable, open-source model that handles massive context windows at a fraction of the cost,” he predicted.
Reputation at stake
But DeepSeek’s reputation as a company at the frontier of AI technology is also at stake.
Its models previously relied on Nvidia chips, so a move to collaborate with domestic chipmakers would require “substantial re-engineering,” Wei said.
The United States cites national security concerns as the reason for its export ban on Nvidia’s most powerful AI processors to China.
But some reports allege that DeepSeek skirted the ban to train V4 using thousands of Nvidia’s top-end Blackwell chips, dismantled in third countries and smuggled to China.
Another Chinese AI startup, Zhipu, in January unveiled an image generator that it said had been entirely trained on Huawei chips.
