Five positives coming out of the DeepSeek apocalypse

My RISE marketing community is always a few steps ahead of the curve. A month ago, I posted a comment questioning why nobody was paying attention to the startup DeepSeek platform coming out of China.

Well, the world finally caught up, and we woke up Monday morning to a whole new AI world. Some pundits claimed the AI world was upended overnight. One week ago, I read a Goldman Sachs analysis of five possible threats to Nvidia — a Chinese upstart was not one of them! As of this moment, Nvidia has shed $600 billion in market value, the biggest stock slide in history, all because of DeepSeek.

While this development shook the AI bluebloods to their core, I think there are upsides to this calamity. Let’s dig a little deeper today.

DeepSeek: What happened?

If you’re new to this news story, let’s have a quick review.

Last week, a 22-page paper was released by a Chinese A.I. start-up called DeepSeek. It took a few days for researchers to digest the paper’s claims, and the implications of what it described. The company had created a new A.I. model called DeepSeek-R1, built with a modest number of second-rate A.I. chips that matched the performance of leading American A.I. models at a fraction of the cost.