Chinese AI Company DeepSeek Releases Image Generator
The Chinese AI company DeepSeek — which has sent shockwaves through the U.S. stock market this week — has unveiled a new AI image generator that it claims can outperform OpenAI’s DALL-E 3.
DeepSeek says its AI model, Janus-Pro-7B, is better than Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 3. The model is a major upgrade on its previous image generator, Janus, which was launched in late 2024.
The multimodal AI can read, as well as generate images. Although it can only read images that are 384 x 384, per Tech Crunch. DeepSeek has made Janus available to download from Hugging Face.
“Janus-Pro surpasses previous unified model and matches or exceeds the performance of task-specific models,” DeepSeek writes in a post on Hugging Face. “The simplicity, high flexibility, and effectiveness of Janus-Pro make it a strong candidate for next-generation unified multimodal models.”
DeepSeek Panics US Markets
The release of DeepSeek R1, an LLM chatbot that has risen to the top of App Store charts, spooked the markets on Monday and sent global technology shares tumbling as investors sold off their stock.
The release of a Chinese-made AI model that was reportedly built on a relatively small $6 million budget and without Nvidia chips undermine many of the assumptions around the AI industry.
Nvidia stocks fell 17 percent on Monday, wiping $593 billion from its market value — a record single-day loss for any company. All U.S. stocks suffered as a result.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called DeepSeek’s R1 an “impressive” model on social media, adding it is “invigorating” to have a new competitor. President Trump called it “a wakeup call for our industries.”
Reuters reports that DeepSeek coming out of nowhere to claim the top spot on the App Store has upended the perception that China was years behind U.S. AI companies.
“What makes Monday’s tech sell-off so jarring is that the valuations of many of these AI and tech companies offer no margin of error,” David Bahnsen, chief investment officer at The Bahnsen Group, tells Reuters.
“The excessive weighting these tech stocks have in many investor portfolios and the high concentration these tech stocks have in the market indices was a significant and under-appreciated risk issue.”
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
