Zhang, who studied AI at Tsinghua University, founded Doodod in 2012 to build customer engagement through social media analysis. He said the company — which counts China Merchant's Bank and Toyota as clients — started looking at DeepSeek's offerings late last year, and began using it more after the R1 release in late January.

Just days after DeepSeek R1 made headlines, Moonshot AI introduced Kimi AI 1.5, a model already touted superior to OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet. This latest entrant shows advancements in multimodal reasoning, long-context understanding, and real-time data processing, raising questions about the future of AI dominance.

DeepSeek’s R1 model uses inference to generate output without needing high-power chips, making Chinese-produced chips a a viable option.

DeepSeeks artificial intelligence (AI) models are giving Chinese chipmakers like Huawei a competitive edge against U.S. processors, particularly in AI inference tasks. Unlike Nvidias powerful chips designed for training