The DeepSeek startup was founded in 2023 by 40-year-old Chinese entrepreneur Liang Wenfeng. The company released its open-source models for download in the United States in early January.

DeepSeek’s latest product, an advanced reasoning model called R1, has been compared favorably to the best products of OpenAI and Meta while appearing to be more efficient, with lower costs to train and develop models and having possibly been made without relying on the most powerful Nvidia AI accelerators that are harder to buy in China because of U.S. export controls.

But, user beware.  DeepSeek’s views and outputs are all Communist Party state-approved. That means, according to their AI, there’s no information about the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident, and it won’t tell you about Chinese internment camps, protests in Hong Kong or anything else the oppressive Chinese government doesn’t want you to know.

Also keep in mind, anytime you’re using a digital tool developed in China, assume your personal data is being ,collected, stored and exploited by the Chinese Communist authoritarian government.

Despite the questions remaining about the true cost and process to build DeepSeek’s products, technology companies stock market prices were sent into a panic, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq was on the way to its third-worst day of the last two years.