The Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek has been generating a lot of buzz in the tech world, especially with its newly released chatbot. Some investors wonder if it’s a stronger competitor than Microsoft’s ChatGPT. As a result, tech stocks have experienced significant volatility this week.
DeepSeek’s rise in popularity
Despite DeepSeek’s rapid rise, with its chatbot becoming the most downloaded app on Apple’s App Store shortly after its rollout, a new study suggests that the chatbot lags behind competitors in accuracy.
DeepSeek claims its AI model performs on par or better than Western competitors like ChatGPT, owned by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, at a fraction of the cost.
The company reports that training its model cost $6 million, compared to the billions spent by Silicon Valley companies on their models.
The reported success of DeepSeek has had a major impact on U.S. tech stocks, wiping out approximately 1 trillion dollars in value.
Study highlights DeepSeek’s accuracy issues
A study conducted by NewsGuard, a global leader in information reliability, revealed issues with DeepSeek’s answers.
The research shows that DeepSeek’s chatbot only provided accurate responses to news and information prompts 17% of the time. In 30% of the cases, it repeated false claims, and 52% of the time, it gave “vague or unhelpful responses” to news-related questions.
NewsGuard rates DeepSeek’s chatbot with a fail rate of 83%, compared to 62% for its competitors.
Concerns over lack of safeguards
Further concerns about DeepSeek’s chatbot have emerged from the cybercrime threat intelligence platform KELA. The platform warned that the chatbot lacks certain safeguards and could potentially instruct users on how to make a bomb.
Tech analysts focus on cost over accuracy
Despite these issues, some analysts argue that the chatbot’s appeal lies not in its accuracy but in its low cost.
A spokesperson from D.A. Davidson told Reuters, “The importance of the DeepSeek breakthrough is not in answering news-related questions accurately; it is in the fact that it can answer any question at 1/30th of the cost of comparable AI models.”
NewsGuard rating of Straight Arrow News
NewsGuard, the organization behind the study, is a leader in providing data and analysis on the reliability of news sources. It helps guide consumers toward trustworthy journalism by evaluating news organizations based on nine factors of credibility.
NewsGuard has given Straight Arrow News a 100% reliability rating for its unbiased and fact-based reporting.
Click here to learn more about SAN’s mission and early successes in reaching trustworthy standards from media watchdog groups.