"The launch of DeepSeek, with its advanced capabilities, marks a new era for AI, transforming how we access, process, and interact with information," said DigitX India co-founder Ashish Mehta while speaking to The Quint.
His comments came as China's latest AI startup DeepSeek made thousands of heads turn in the global IT industry following its launch on Monday, 27 January, and sent American big tech firms, hitherto ensconced in their monopolistic position, scrambling to understand what had just hit them.
While DeepSeek's true potential is yet to be understood and scrutinised, the company claims that its model DeepSeek R1 has the same capabilities as OpenAI's o1 model – and is 20 to 50 times cheaper to use than the latter.
That claim itself was enough to make it the most downloaded app on Apple's App Store.
It also initiated a shock reaction in US markets – sending the NASDAQ tumbling 3 percent, largely on the back of US chipmaker Nvidia's shares crashing by a whopping 17 percent following the launch of DeepSeek's AI model on Monday, equating to a loss of approximately $600 billion in market capitalisation. The loss was the biggest one-day drop for a US company in history.