Seek .(US:SKLTY) Sou Hu Cai Jing·2025-12-10 05:12Core Insights - DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company founded in July 2023, has rapidly ascended to become the sixth largest unicorn globally, with a valuation of 1.05 trillion yuan, second only to ByteDance in China [1][2]. Company Performance - DeepSeek's explosive growth began in early 2025, with its app reaching 180 million monthly active users within a month of launch, and further increasing to 194 million by March [3]. - However, by May 2025, the monthly active users dropped to 169 million, and by September, it was surpassed by ByteDance's Doubao, which had 172 million users [3]. - The company released its DeepSeek-V3.2 model on December 1, 2025, achieving reasoning capabilities comparable to GPT-5 and close to Google's Gemini-3.0-Pro [3]. Competitive Landscape - The AI sector is witnessing intense competition, with major players like ByteDance and Alibaba investing heavily in AI infrastructure, with ByteDance spending 80 billion yuan in 2024 and Alibaba committing 380 billion yuan over three years [3]. - DeepSeek has adopted an open-source strategy, offering competitive API pricing, with input costs for DeepSeek-V3 as low as 0.5 yuan per million tokens, significantly cheaper than GPT-4 Turbo [6]. Technological Developments - The generative AI landscape is evolving with three main technological directions: text generation, image generation, and video generation [4][5]. - Major international players, including Google, are making significant advancements in generative AI, with Google launching multimodal models that enhance image and video quality [6]. Industry Transformation - AI is reshaping various industries, enhancing productivity in programming, transforming artistic creation, and revolutionizing the film industry [7]. - The emergence of new job roles such as AI trainers and prompt engineers reflects the changing job landscape due to AI integration [7]. Infrastructure and Energy - The competition in AI is increasingly tied to computational power and energy resources, with a shift from chip supply issues to energy shortages [8]. - China, possessing the largest power infrastructure and rapidly growing renewable energy capacity, is positioned to leverage its energy advantages for AI development [8]. Conclusion - DeepSeek's rise as a global AI unicorn highlights China's potential in the AI sector, driven by a unique approach to technology and market strategy [9]. - The global generative AI competition encompasses various dimensions, including technological breakthroughs and infrastructure development, with China developing a differentiated competitive edge [9].