Business
What is DeepSeek? And How Is It Upending A.I.?
Tech stocks tumbled. Giant companies like Meta and Nvidia faced a barrage of questions about their future. Tech executives took to social media to proclaim their fears.
And it was all because of a little-known Chinese artificial intelligence start-up called DeepSeek.
DeepSeek caused waves all over the world on Monday as one of its accomplishments — that it had created a very powerful A.I. model with far less money than many A.I. experts thought possible — raised a host of questions, including whether U.S. companies were even competitive in A.I. anymore.
DeepSeek is “AI’s Sputnik moment,” Marc Andreessen, a tech venture capitalist, posted on social media on Sunday.
How could a company that few people had heard of have such an effect?
What is DeepSeek?
DeepSeek is a start-up founded and owned by the Chinese stock trading firm High-Flyer. Its goal is to build A.I. technologies along the lines of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot or Google’s Gemini. By 2021, DeepSeek had acquired thousands of computer chips from the U.S. chipmaker Nvidia, which are a fundamental part of any effort to create powerful A.I. systems.
In China, the start-up is known for grabbing young and talented A.I. researchers from top universities, promising high salaries and an opportunity to work on cutting-edge research projects. Both High-Flyer and DeepSeek are run by Liang Wenfeng, a Chinese entrepreneur.
Over the past few years, DeepSeek has released several large language models, which is the kind of technology that underpins chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini. On Jan. 10, it released its first free chatbot app, which was based on a new model called DeepSeek-V3.
Why did the stock market react to it now?
When DeepSeek introduced its DeepSeek-V3 model the day after Christmas, it matched the abilities of the best chatbots from U.S. companies like OpenAI and Google. That alone would have been impressive.
But the team behind the new system also revealed a bigger step forward. In a research paper explaining how it built the technology, DeepSeek said it used only a fraction of the computer chips that leading A.I. companies relied on to train their systems.
The world’s top companies typically train their chatbots with supercomputers that use as many as 16,000 chips or more. DeepSeek’s engineers said they needed only about 2,000 Nvidia chips.
Why is that important?
Since late 2022, when OpenAI set off the A.I. boom, the prevailing notion had been that the most powerful A.I. systems could not be built without investing billions of dollars in specialized A.I. chips. That would mean that only the biggest tech companies — such as Microsoft, Google and Meta, all of which are based in the United States — could afford to build the leading technologies.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two tech companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
But DeepSeek’s engineers said they needed only about $6 million in raw computing power to train their new system. That was roughly 10 times less than what Meta spent building its latest A.I. technology.
How did DeepSeek make its tech with fewer A.I. chips?
Top A.I. engineers in the United States say that DeepSeek’s research paper laid out clever and impressive ways of building A.I. technology with fewer chips.
In short, the startup’s engineers demonstrated a more efficient way of analyzing data using the chips. Leading A.I. systems learn their skills by pinpointing patterns in huge amounts of data, including text, images and sounds. DeepSeek described a way of spreading this data analysis across several specialized A.I. models — what researchers call a “mixture of experts” method — while minimizing the time lost by moving data from place to place.
Others have used similar methods before, but moving information between the models tended to reduce efficiency. DeepSeek did this in a way that allowed it to use less computing power.
“It has become very clear that other companies, not just someone like OpenAI, can build these kinds of systems,” said Tim Dettmers, a researcher at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle and a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in building efficient A.I. systems. “DeepSeek used methods that anyone can duplicate.”
DeepSeek’s research paper raised questions about whether big U.S. companies could maintain a significant lead in A.I. Many experts believe that A.I. technology will become a commodity, with many companies selling much the same product.
Is DeepSeek’s tech as good as systems from OpenAI and Google?
DeepSeek-V3 can answer questions, solve logic problems and write its own computer programs as effectively as anything already on the market, according to standard benchmark tests.
Just before DeepSeek released its technology, OpenAI had unveiled a new system, called OpenAI o3, which seemed more powerful than DeepSeek-V3. But OpenAI has not released this system to the wider public.
OpenAI o3 was designed to “reason” through problems involving math, science and computer programming. Many experts pointed out that DeepSeek had not built a reasoning model along these lines, which is seen as the future of A.I.
Then on Jan. 20, DeepSeek released its own reasoning model called DeepSeek R1, and it, too, impressed the experts. That eventually sent U.S. investors and others into a panic late last week and over the weekend as they realized the importance of DeepSeek’s new technology.
U.S. tech giants are building data centers with specialized A.I. chips. Does this still matter, given what DeepSeek has done?
Yes, it still matters.
Large numbers of A.I. chips can still help companies in many ways. With more chips, they can run more experiments as they explore new ways of building A.I. In other words, more chips can still give companies a technical and competitive advantage.
More chips will also be needed to operate the new breed of “reasoning” A.I. models, experts said. These require more computing power when people and businesses use them.
Hasn’t the United States limited the number of Nvidia chips sold to China?
Yes. To maintain the U.S. lead in the global A.I. race, the Biden administration had put in place rules limiting the number of powerful chips that could be sold to China and other rivals.
But the impressive performance of the DeepSeek model raised questions about the unintended consequences of the American government’s trade restrictions. The controls have forced researchers in China to get creative with a wide range of tools that are freely available on the internet.
Some experts continue to argue in favor of U.S. trade restrictions, saying that they were only recently put in place and that they will have a greater effect on China’s abilities to create A.I. as the years pass.
Does DeepSeek’s tech mean that China is now ahead of the United States in A.I.?
No. The world has not yet seen OpenAI’s o3 model, and its performance on standard benchmark tests was more impressive than anything else on the market. But experts are concerned that China is jumping ahead on open-source A.I. systems.
What exactly is open-source A.I.?
Like many other companies, DeepSeek has “open sourced” its latest A.I. system, which means that it has shared the underlying computer code with other businesses and researchers. This allows others to build and distribute their own products using the same technologies.
This is part of the reason DeepSeek and others in China have been able to build competitive A.I. systems so quickly and inexpensively.
In the A.I. world, open source first gathered steam in 2023 when Meta freely shared an A.I. system called Llama. At the time, many assumed that the open-source ecosystem would flourish only if companies like Meta — giant firms with huge data centers filled with specialized chips — continued to open source their technologies.
But DeepSeek and others have shown that this ecosystem can thrive in ways that extend beyond the American tech giants.
Why is that important?
Many experts have argued that the big U.S. companies should not open source their technologies because they could be used to spread disinformation or cause other serious harm. Some U.S. lawmakers have explored the possibility of preventing or throttling the practice.
But other experts have argued that if regulators stifle the progress of open-source technology in the United States, China will gain a significant edge. If the best open-source technologies come from China, these experts argue, U.S. researchers and companies will build their systems atop those technologies.
In the long run, that could put China at the heart of A.I. research and development, which could further accelerate its effort to build a wide range of A.I. technologies, including autonomous weapons and other military systems.
Business
L.A. County fire victims sue State Farm for negligence, claim they were 'grossly underinsured'
Six couples and one individual who lost their homes in the devastating Los Angeles County fires are suing State Farm, claiming that they were misled by the insurance company and that their homes were deliberately and “grossly underinsured.”
The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Coutny Superior Court on Monday, alleges that State Farm General — the California home insurer that is part of Bloomington, Ill.-based State Farm Group — took advantage of homeowners’ lack of knowledge about rebuilding costs and set projected replacement costs far lower than the actual costs, leaving fire victims without enough money to replace or rebuild their homes.
State Farm, California’s largest home insurer, has engaged in a “multi-faceted illegal scheme” that is designed to “reap enormous illicit profits by deceptively misleading over a million homeowners in California,” the complaint alleges.
The lawsuit alleges negligence, breach of contract and several other causes of action, and seeks compensatory and punitive damages and reform of State Farm’s policies.
Representatives for State Farm did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This marks the second time L.A. County fire victims have sued insurers because they believe they were systematically underinsured. USAA and two insurers affiliated with AAA were sued in early June by policyholders with similar claims that they did not have enough money to rebuild.
Of the seven households that are a part of the lawsuit, four were from Altadena, two were from Pacific Palisades and one was from Sierra Madre. Each of the homeowners had policies with State Farm, and some were underinsured by more than $2 million when their homes were destroyed by the Palisades and Eaton fires.
In one instance outlined in the lawsuit, homeowners wrote to their State Farm agent before the January fires to confirm whether the dwelling limit of just over $1 million would sufficiently cover the cost of rebuilding their Altadena home. The agent confirmed the amount covered the total cost to rebuild. After their home burned down, the estimates the couple received to rebuild were in excess of $3 million, the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit comes days after state Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara announced his department is launching a formal inquiry into how State Farm General is handling thousands of claims filed by fire victims after receiving complaints.
As of June 12, State Farm said, it has received more than 12,800 claims related to the fires and has paid more than $4.03 billion to its California customers.
State Farm has also been named as a defendant in an April lawsuit filed by homeowners who accuse dozens of insurers of colluding over the last several years to force them into the California FAIR Plan, the insurer of last resort that offers limited but typically expensive coverage. The homeowners claim the insurers refused to write new policies in fire-prone areas and then profited from the higher premiums while reducing their liabilities with the FAIR Plan in the event of a catastrophe like the January fires.
The latest lawsuit against State Farm claims that the insurer’s alleged collusion with other carriers to push homeowners onto the FAIR Plan meant the only policies left for the company were ones that “carried deliberately suppressed coverage limits of sufficiently low magnitude,” posing a lesser exposure risk for State Farm.
The average homeowner, the complaint states, would have little reason to question the replacement costs estimated by State Farm because it writes more than a million California homeowners insurance policies each year by generating reconstruction cost estimates.
The policyholders in the suit, as well as several other affected homeowners, the lawsuit said, are unable to rebuild their homes without “relief from the legal system.”
Times staff writer Laurence Darmiento contributed to this report.
William Langewiesche, a magazine writer and author who forged complex narratives with precision-tooled prose that shed fresh light on national security, the occupation of Iraq and, especially, aviation disasters — he was a professional pilot — died on Sunday in East Lyme, Conn. He was 70.
Cullen Murphy, his longtime editor at The Atlantic and Vanity Fair, confirmed the death, at the home of a friend, saying the cause was prostate cancer.
Mr. Langewiesche (pronounced long-gah-vee-shuh) was one of the most prominent long-form nonfiction writers of recent decades. He was an international correspondent for Vanity Fair, a writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine and a national correspondent for The Atlantic.
For 10 years running, from 1999 to 2008, his pieces were finalists for the National Magazine Award, and he won it twice: in 2007 for “Rules of Engagement,” about the killing of 24 unarmed civilians by U.S. Marines in 2005 in Haditha, Iraq; and in 2002 for “The Crash of EgyptAir 990,” about a flight that went down in the Atlantic Ocean in 1999 with the loss of all 217 people aboard.
He chose to write often about calamitous events, piecing together a meticulous explanation for what went wrong while portraying the human subjects under his microscope with sympathy.
“At his best there’s a sort of cinematic omniscience in the way he writes,” Mr. Murphy said in an interview. “And so you feel almost as he feels, with your face pressed up against the window watching something unfold, often very rapidly, and often wishing that things would unfold very differently but knowing there’s nothing that can be done.”
Mr. Langewiesche’s account of the EgyptAir crash in 1999, which was profoundly enriched by his own aviation background, blamed a suicidal co-pilot. Egyptian officials refused to accept that conclusion, a response, he wrote, that was rooted in political and cultural chauvinism.
Mr. Langewiesche learned to fly as a boy and worked as a commercial pilot early on to support his literary ambition. He drew on his aviation expertise in a number of articles and books that laid out highly technical subjects in lucid prose.
Writing about Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III’s famous landing of a commercial airliner in the Hudson River in 2009, Mr. Langewiesche made the case that that injury-free belly flop was a testament more to modern airplane technology than to the heroism of the pilot.
Captain Sullenberger took issue with that account, telling The New York Times that Mr. Langewiesche’s book about the episode, “Fly by Wire,” contained “misstatements of fact.”
Reviewing “Fly by Wire” in The Times, the book critic Dwight Garner wrote, “Written quickly, it lacks some of the eloquence and steely control of Mr. Langewiesche’s earlier books.” Mr. Garner called Mr. Langewiesche “the Steve McQueen of American journalism,” referring to the author’s muscular prose style and often gripping subject matter.
In other projects — pursued thanks to editors who allowed him months for reporting and writing — Mr. Langewiesche wrote an account in The Atlantic in 2006 about how terrorists might obtain a nuclear bomb; another article, also in The Atlantic, in 2004, dissected the sinking of a ferry in the Baltic Sea a decade earlier.
His 2002 book, “American Ground: Unbuilding The World Trade Center,” based on a three-part series in The Atlantic, was reported over six months at ground zero as he meticulously covered the cleanup after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Not all of his work described life and death dramas. His profile of Robert M. Parker Jr. in The Atlantic, “The Million-Dollar Nose,” opened with the enticing line: “The most influential critic in the world today happens to be a critic of wine.”
Closer to form, he wrote about another aviation mystery: the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines flight with 277 passengers over the Indian Ocean in 2014, an article that generated enormous readership for The Atlantic.
The plane remained aloft for hours after someone in the cockpit shut down its communication signals, then plunged into the Indian Ocean.
Mr. Langewiesche hypothesized a scenario in which a pilot intent on murder-suicide had asphyxiated his passengers by climbing to 40,000 feet while depressurizing the cabin, then cruised onward until the fuel ran out and the plane plummeted.
“The scene would have been dimly lit by the emergency lights,” Mr. Langewiesche wrote, imagining those hours in chilling detail, “with the dead belted into their seats, their faces nestled in the worthless oxygen masks dangling on tubes from the ceiling.”
Of the captain, the last living soul in the plane, he wrote, “The cockpit is the deepest, most protective, most private sort of home.”
William Archibald Langewiesche was born on June 12, 1955, in Sharon, Conn. His mother, Priscila (Coleman) Langewiesche, was a computer analyst. His father, Wolfgang Langewiesche, a German-born émigré, was a test pilot for the maker of the Corsair fighter used by the U.S. Navy; he wrote a classic book on flying, “Stick and Rudder,” in the 1940s.
William, a late child, had an adult sister and brothers when he was growing up. His father taught him to fly before the boy could see over the instrument panel. Later, as an undergraduate at Stanford University, Mr. Langewiesche helped pay his way through college by piloting air taxis and charters.
After earning a degree in anthropology, he moved to New York City and worked for Flying magazine. But he quit the job because he aspired to write literary nonfiction, in part inspired by The New Yorker writer John McPhee. While struggling to be published, Mr. Langewiesche supported himself as a corporate pilot.
“Other people trying to break into writing have to work as waiters,” he told Aviation News in 2001, “and I considered myself as having a technical skill — like a welder — that I could use to support myself.”
His breakthrough came in 1991, when The Atlantic published as its November cover story his article “The World in Its Extreme,’’ a 17,000-word travelogue and natural history of the Sahara Desert. He went on to write for the magazine as a national correspondent for 15 years. In 2006, he became an international correspondent for Vanity Fair, where he contributed two to four lengthy articles a year through 2019.
Mr. Langewiesche married Anne-Marie Girard in 1977, and they had two children. The marriage ended in divorce in 2017, and the following year, he married Tia Cibani, who survives him.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by his son Matthew and his daughter Anna Langewiesche, both from his first marriage; his son Archibald and his daughter Castine Langewiesche, from his second marriage; and his sister, Lena Langewiesche. He lived in North Salem, N.Y., in Westchester County.
In a 2007 interview with Mediabistro, an online career site for designers and writers, Mr. Langewiesche described his method. Instead of reading exhaustively about a subject and writing questions for interviews in advance, he preferred to plunge right into a subject “with very little preparation, intentionally somewhat naïve about it.”
“I just talk to people and listen carefully and respond to what they’re saying and try to give of myself as much as I’m asking them to give of themselves, so that a true conversation can develop,” he said. “These conversations typically will go on for weeks, on and off. Sometimes I take notes.”
The real work, he said, came later when he sat down to write.
“Writing is thinking; writing is a form of thought,” he said. “It’s difficult for me to believe that real thought is possible without writing.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
Business
Spectrum says would-be copper thieves caused internet outage affecting L.A., Ventura counties
An attempted — and unsuccessful — copper theft in Van Nuys caused a widespread internet outage Sunday affecting swaths of Los Angeles and Ventura counties, a Spectrum spokesman confirmed to The Times.
“This morning, our lines were cut due to vandalism in Van Nuys that also affected our services in other parts of Los Angeles and Ventura,” said spokesperson Dennis Johnson. In an update on the company’s progress in restoring service, Johnson said late Sunday afternoon that “technicians restored services in Ventura this morning, and services continue to be restored this afternoon in Los Angeles.”
The incident Johnson attributed the incident to copper wire thieves — who were looking for copper in a place where there was none.
The company said that one or more individuals cut multiple fiber lines that were on the poles, apparently climbing trees to gain access. The lines were cut sometime after midnight.
Users reported on social media that their internet was out in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday and throughout the day — with some voicing frustration over the disruption occurring on Father’s Day.
On X, user @strappyheels wanted to know: “Will customers get credit on their bill since the outage has been ongoing since 2am and there is no ETA?”
Another apparent customer, @5cottFive expressed disbelief on social media at Spectrum’s posted explanation citing “a criminal act of vandalism.”
“There’s no way a single act of vandalism took out regional internet for all of Ventura and Los Angles counties,” the user posted. “This is a serious outage spanning from Ventura, Ojai, Simi, The Valley, and apparently all the way down to Anaheim.”
But the outage was not universal or as long-lasting for some. At 4:57 p.m., @Ladybugzz21 posted that her internet in the San Fernando Valley was working.
Work to restore some areas was continuing into the evening, the company stated.
The company has had to make “thousands” of fiber splices to repair the lines, a process that is time consuming, even with the help of extra crews that were called in, a company statement said: “The fibers need to be spliced in the lines to restore services.”
In its statement, Spectrum said that the severing of wires has become “an issue affecting the entire telecommunications industry, not just Spectrum, largely due to the increase in the price of precious metals. These acts of vandalism are not only a crime, but also affect our customers, local businesses and potentially emergency services.”
The statement noted: “Spectrum’s fiber lines do not include any copper.”
The company said it was working with the Los Angeles Police Department in offering a reward of up to $25,000 for information leading to an arrest: “Anyone with information on this act of vandalism can contact Spectrum at (833) 404-TIPS or 8477 or reach out to local law enforcement.”
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