DeepSeek Inside: Origins, Technology, and Impact
Author(s)
Cusumano, Michael
Date Issued
June 18, 2025
Journal
Communications of the ACM
Publisher
ACM|Communications of the ACM
Citation
Michael A. Cusumano. 2025. DeepSeek Inside: Origins, Technology, and Impact. Commun. ACM 68, 7 (July 2025), 18–22.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The release of DeepSeek V3 and R1 in January 2025 caused steep declines in the stock prices of companies that provide generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) infrastructure technology and datacenter services. These two large language models (LLMs) came from a little-known Chinese startup with approximately 200 employees compared to at least 3,500 employees for industry-leader OpenAI. DeepSeek seemed to have developed this powerful technology much more cheaply than previously thought possible. If true, DeepSeek had the potential to disrupt the economics of the entire GenAI ecosystem and the dominance of U.S. companies ranging from OpenAI to Nvidia.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3732796
