The deep repercussions of DeepSeek's first splash in Western waters

China took the world by storm early this week with its new AI startup DeepSeek. To be fair, the app was already available for free since January 10. Monday was just the day the western world realized how big the splash caused by the little blue whale could be. Screens on Wall Street were painted red all day long, while almost 1 trillion dollars was wiped off the stock market in the US alone.

The pill was indeed not easy to swallow: DeepSeek was not only comparing positively to the likes of ChatGPT, Gemini or Llama in terms of processing capabilities, but also it was open source AND allegedly cost only $5.6 million to make – which is probably less than just the salary of one or two leading roles in a company like OpenAI.

By now, the web is filled with thousands of baffled articles, videos and posts about it, so we won't bore you with that. But we at AltaVox decided to do as the proverbial blue whale and dive deep into how the internet is reacting to this massive turn of events.

To do so, we turned to our own platform AltaVox Reveal, and analyzed a total of 24,363 comments from three videos:

China's massive AI breakthrough (by CNBC, on YouTube)

A punch on Trump's mouth (by CNN Brazil, on TikTok)

A tough Monday (by Infomoney, on Facebook)

On the US-based CNBC video, almost half of the comments (43%) were focused on worries about the US dominance (or lack thereof) in the AI field:

"China's massive AI breakthrough" topic and sentiment analysis

Brazil was busy being Brazil: on CNN Brazil's post, jokes and ironic remarks dominated 42% of the engagements, with comments like “The US cried so the rest of the world could laugh 😂”, while on Infomoney's video, discussions were centered on celebrating China's technological success and the losses faced by Silicon Valley billionaires.

"A punch on Trump's mouth" topic and sentiment analysis

This was just scratching the surface, of course, so we decided to dig a bit deeper into one specific subject that actually concerns us at AltaVox ourselves, as an AI-powered startup, which is the staggering low budget with which DeepSeek was made.

To borrow the words from our tool's automated analysis:

“The discussion around DeepSeek's production cost reveals a mix of skepticism and admiration. Many believe that China has significantly undercut costs by potentially copying existing technologies and using efficient methods (34%), while others praise its achievements as a testament to Chinese innovation (36%).

“There are doubts about the transparency of DeepSeek's cost claims, with some suggesting hidden resources or strategies. The conversation also touches on the geopolitical implications and competition between the U.S. and China, with some seeing Deepseek's success as a challenge to American dominance."

Topic and sentiment analysis on "Deepseek's production cost" subject

These numbers paint quite an interesting picture of this moment: while a big portion of the audience seems excited by China's feat, just about the same amount of people seem to be in disbelief, regarding DeepSeek as “just a copy” or even a fake.

The aftershocks of something of this magnitude will surely rattle the world for years to come, and we've only seen the first wave of the tsunami of debates that this breakthrough will bring.

Navigating such rough seas of information can be tricky, but not with AltaVox. If you're interested in a demo session, reach out to us at contact@altavox.ai.