A Chinese company working in the field of artificial intelligence Deep Sick It has reportedly paused the second round of funding.
That’s according to A a report Saturday (July 25) from Bloomberg News, which says the decision comes after days of widespread comments about US-Chinese competition in artificial intelligence, widely attributed to the company’s founder.
DeepSeek has informed some potential investors that they will not sign investment agreements as planned, sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.
According to the report, the sources said the suspension was partly related to founder Liang Wenfeng’s frustration over online reports about his comments to investors during the company’s first financing deal, which Raised $7 billion.
The report in question, which Bloomberg said it had not verified, covered the transcript of a meeting Liang held with unspecified parties, in which he discussed reliance on Nvidia chips for developing artificial intelligence and China’s continued lag in the development of artificial intelligence compared to the United States.
The report added that DeepSeek was aiming to raise at least 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion) of new financing in the second round, and was targeting a pre-money valuation of at least 480 billion yuan, or $70.8 billion. The first round valued DeepSeek at $50 billion.
DeepSeek sent shockwaves through the AI world early last year when this happened The artificial intelligence model debuted Which delivered performance similar to that of US competitors OpenAI and Meta while using far fewer Nvidia chips.
And the company too Preparing for an initial public offering The report added that the IPO may come as soon as this year.
In other AI news, last week PYMNTS wrote about new research showing this weakness Regulating artificial intelligence It can lead to worse safety outcomes than no regulation at all.
Research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences By researchers from Cornell University and Carnegie Mellon University, It found that poorly targeted or insufficiently stringent regulation can motivate companies to reduce their investments in safety and shift responsibility to others.
When downstream companies are expected to ensure that their applications adhere to regulatory standards, general-purpose model builders can do just that. Probably a “free ride” The report said that these investments are made through reducing procedures such as safety audits carried out by a third party.
“There is free-riding behavior going on,” said lead author Benjamin Laufer. “The regulation acts as a tool for the general provider to offload the burden of safety to the downstream specialist.”
