DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence company that recently surprised the tech world, announced Monday that its new Janus-Pro-7B model has outperformed top players OpenAI and Stability AI in image generation benchmarks.
The new image model builds on DeepSeek’s original Janus system, released in late 2023. Technical documentation indicates improvements in image stability and detail, achieved through enhanced training processes and a dataset of 72 million synthetic images balanced with real-world data.
The breakthrough follows other recent successes for DeepSeek, a startup launched in December 2023 by Liang Wenfeng. The company’s AI chatbot has become America’s most downloaded free app on Apple’s platform practically overnight. Despite its impact, DeepSeek claims it operates via a relatively small team — Chinese media puts the number at under 140 employees, with most recruited from the country’s top universities.
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More notably, the startup claims to have trained its model using just 2,000 specialized chips combined with less expensive processors — far, far fewer than the estimated 16,000 chips typically used by Western AI models.
The news, coming out so soon after President Donald Trump announced plans to invest $500 billion into US AI infrastructure, rattled tech markets — chipmaker Nvidia suffered the brunt of the hit with a record $600 billion market value drop on Monday.
However, some experts remain skeptical of DeepSeek’s claims. Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang told CNBC that DeepSeek may have 50,000 leading-edge chips that they “can’t talk about, obviously, because it is against the export controls that the United States has put in place.”
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