DeepSeek had more than 355 million users as of February. Photo: Xinhua

    DeepSeek 12-hour outage leaves millions cut off, sparks complaints as rivals gain ground

    Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek suffered a prolonged outage overnight that extended into early Monday morning, disrupting service for hundreds of millions of users, according to a company notice and user feedback. The Hangzhou-based AI lab’s namesake chatbot website and app were offline from Sunday evening, with the company continuing to investigate while issuing fixes…

    Read More
    Photographer: Raul Ariano/Bloomberg

      China AI Startup Moonshot Snags Funds at $18 Billion Valuation

      Photographer: Raul Ariano/Bloomberg (Bloomberg) — Moonshot AI is seeking to raise as much as $1 billion in an expanded funding round that would value the startup at about $18 billion, more than quadrupling its valuation in just three months and underscoring growing interest in Chinese AI developers racing to rival Silicon Valley leaders. The company…

      Read More

        Moonshot and MiniMax step up as China’s new frontier AI labs

        Chinese artificial intelligence start-ups Moonshot AI and MiniMax have emerged as China’s strongest contenders to rival US frontier labs in 2025 – even as DeepSeek has stolen the spotlight as the poster child for the country’s AI ambitions. Moonshot AI, founded by 33-year-old Yang Zhilin, has sharply raised its profile in China’s AI ecosystem with…

        Read More
        Why new model of China’s Moonshot AI stirs ‘DeepSeek moment’ debate

        Why new model of China’s Moonshot AI stirs ‘DeepSeek moment’ debate

        Beijing-based Moonshot AI, a start-up valued at US$3.3 billion and backed by Chinese tech giants like Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings, has presented another David-vs-Goliath story after creating an open-source model that “set new records across benchmarks that assess reasoning, coding and agent capabilities”. The new reasoning model, Kimi K2 Thinking, was the most…

        Read More