DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup that has captured much of the artificial intelligence (AI) buzz in recent days, said it’s restricting registrations on the service, citing malicious attacks.
“Due to large-scale malicious attacks on DeepSeek’s services, we are temporarily limiting registrations to ensure continued service,” the company said in an incident report page. “Existing users can log in as usual. Thanks for your understanding and support.”
Users attempting to sign up for an account are being displayed a similar message, stating “registration may be busy” and that they should wait and try again.
“With the popularity of DeepSeek growing, it’s not a big surprise that they are being targeted by malicious web traffic,” Eric Kron, security awareness advocate at KnowBe4, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News.
“These sorts of attacks could be a way to extort an organization by promising to stop attacks and restore availability for a fee, it could be rival organizations seeking to negatively impact the competition, or it could even be people who have invested in a competing organization and want to protect their investment by taking out the competition.”
DeepSeek, founded in 2023, is a Chinese upstart that’s “dedicated to making AGI [artificial general intelligence] a reality,” according to a description on its Hugging Face page.
The company has become the talking point in the AI world, with its iOS chatbot app reaching the top of Apple’s Top Free Apps chart in the U.S. this week, dethroning OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The company has released a series of reasoning and mix-of-experts language models under an MIT license that it claims can outperform its Silicon Valley rivals while also being trained at a fraction of the cost, something of an achievement in the face of U.S. sanctions that prohibit the sale of advanced AI chips to Chinese companies.
“During the pre-training stage, training DeepSeek-V3 on each trillion tokens requires only 180K H800 GPU hours, i.e., 3.7 days on our cluster with 2048 H800 GPUs,” the company said in a study.
“Consequently, our pre-training stage is completed in less than two months and costs 2664K GPU hours. Combined with 119K GPU hours for the context length extension and 5K GPU hours for post-training, DeepSeek-V3 costs only 2.788M GPU hours for its full training. Assuming the rental price of the H800 GPU is $2 per GPU hour, our total training costs amount to only $5.576M.”
That being said, the platform has been found to censor responses to sensitive topics like Tiananmen Square, Taiwan, and the treatment of Uyghurs in China.
Its privacy policy also notes that users’ personal information – including device and network connection information, usage patterns, and payment details – are hosted in “secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China,” a move that’s likely to pose fresh concerns for Washington amid the TikTok ban.
“We are living in a timeline where a non-U.S. company is keeping the original mission of OpenAI alive – truly open, frontier research that empowers all,” said Jim Fan, senior research manager and lead of Embodied AI (GEAR Lab) at NVIDIA.
OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman called DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model “impressive” and that it’s “legit invigorating to have a new competitor.”