DeepSeek’s app, the Chinese start-up that rekindled the race for artificial intelligence by challenging the American giants, is no longer available in digital stores in Italy. There are no official explanations for this sudden disappearance. “I don’t know if it’s our doing or not, we have asked for information. The company has 20 days to respond,” said Pasquale Stanzione, Privacy Guarantor, who sent an information request to the Chinese app on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, globally, DeepSeek’s website is experiencing slowdowns and navigation difficulties. While the app’s downloads were increasing in Italy, users encountered a message indicating unavailability on the Apple and Google digital stores in Italy. The service still seems accessible to those who had previously downloaded the app and from the DeepSeek website, but with access issues, slowdowns, and navigation difficulties. “A problem has been identified and a solution is being implemented,” writes the Chinese company in the ‘Service Status’ section, which recently suffered a large-scale cyber-attack.
The disappearance of the app from digital stores only occurred in Italy, as it remains available in other European countries and the UK, as reported by Reuters online. On Tuesday, the Privacy Guarantor announced sending an information request to the two Chinese companies managing the artificial intelligence platform – Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence and Beijing DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence – both on the web and the app. “Now the company has 20 days to respond: when they reply, our offices will initiate an in-depth investigation to assess GDPR compliance,” said Stanzione, adding that the Guarantor has requested information from DeepSeek regarding the source code, sources feeding the app, avoidance of biases, protection tools for minors using the application, prevention of interference with fundamental rights of individuals, such as during elections.
In March 2023, the Guarantor initiated an investigation on ChatGpt, and the OpenAI chatbot was down for a month. The service resumed after implementing several platform changes. The investigation concluded last December, with a €15 million fine imposed on the company for data privacy violations. Sam Altman’s company announced an appeal.
Chinese tech giant Alibaba has announced the launch of a new version of its artificial intelligence, named Qwen2.5 Max, claiming it “achieves competitive performance compared to higher-level models” such as Chinese DeepSeek-V3, GPT-4o from OpenAI, and Llama-3.1-405B from Meta. The analysis was conducted using various benchmarks, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
OpenAI, the owner of ChatGpt, has accused the Chinese rival DeepSeek of using their learning models to develop their own artificial intelligence. Bloomberg reports that Microsoft is verifying if OpenAI’s data was used without authorization.
David Sacks, the White House AI czar, raised concerns about potential intellectual property theft by DeepSeek from OpenAI.
“There is a technique in artificial intelligence called distillation… when a model learns from another model (and) essentially sucks knowledge from the main model,” Sacks told Fox News. “There is substantial evidence that what DeepSeek has done here is distill knowledge from OpenAI models, and I don’t think OpenAI is very happy about it,” Sacks added, although no evidence was provided.
The White House spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, announced that US officials are evaluating the national security implications of DeepSeek. “I spoke with the National Security Council this morning, they are assessing what could be the implications for national security,” Leavitt stated.
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In China, Hashtags Celebrate DeepSeek’s Success
Throughout China, citizens are praising the success of the technological startup DeepSeek and its founder, after the company’s new artificial intelligence model disrupted Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
‘Huawei Chips Used for DeepSeek’
It has been revealed that Huawei chips, not just Nvidia’s, were used for DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence. An informant disclosed to the specialized site Gsm Arena that behind the work carried out by the Chinese AI is a chip known as Huawei’s Ascend 910C. This chip is dedicated to the model’s inference activity, generating responses to user queries.
Training, as per official information, occurs on a Nvidia H800 processing unit, a China-specific limited version of the more powerful H100. In both cases, the hardware is not cutting-edge but allows DeepSeek to achieve performance comparable to ChatGpt and other renowned models relying on more potent hardware.
If confirmed, Huawei’s involvement would be a significant indication of the group’s deepening commitment to artificial intelligence. During a summit last April, Huawei outlined its long-term AI strategy, which includes developing a new intelligent assistant for mobile devices.
According to Gsm Arena, Huawei is close to launching the 920C chips aiming to compete with Nvidia’s Blackwell B200, the leading hardware for AI operations.
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