China’s DeepSeek AI model has shaken up the tech world. It has outperformed major players like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude AI. As a result, the app surged to the top of the Apple App Store, surpassing ChatGPT. This impressive success is largely attributed to a team of young innovators who built cutting-edge technology despite having limited resources.

Luo Fuli: The AI Prodigy

One of the key contributors to DeepSeek’s rise is Luo Fuli, a 29-year-old AI researcher. Known as an “AI prodigy” in China, she has made significant strides in natural language processing (NLP). Initially, Luo struggled at Beijing Normal University but later excelled. She earned a place at Peking University’s Institute of Computational Linguistics, where she published eight papers at the prestigious ACL conference in 2019.

Moreover, her achievements caught the attention of tech giants such as Alibaba and Xiaomi. At Alibaba’s DAMO Academy, Luo led the development of the VECO multilingual pre-training model. In 2022, she joined DeepSeek and played a crucial role in developing DeepSeek-V2, which now rivals ChatGPT.

Xiaomi’s Offer

Following her success with DeepSeek, Luo’s exceptional skills did not go unnoticed. Xiaomi’s founder, Lei Jun, offered her a generous annual salary package of 10 million yuan, as reported by the South China Morning Post. It’s clear that her expertise continues to shape the AI industry.

DeepSeek’s Success

DeepSeek, founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng in Hangzhou, China, has quickly made waves in the AI market. The company’s large language models (LLMs) outperform competitors while remaining significantly more cost-effective. For instance, DeepSeek-V3 competes with top models like Llama 3.1, Qwen 2.5, GPT-4o, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

Furthermore, DeepSeek’s R1 model has demonstrated superior performance compared to OpenAI’s o1-mini. Research by Artificial Analysis confirms that DeepSeek’s models outshine those from Google, Meta, and Anthropic in terms of overall quality.

DeepSeek’s Impact on the Tech Market

Since its launch last week, the DeepSeek app has quickly risen to the top of the US app store charts, surpassing ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app. This meteoric rise has sent shockwaves through the US tech market. In fact, shares of AI-related companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Meta experienced a noticeable decline following DeepSeek’s success.