DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup that has captured much of the artificial intelligence (AI) buzz in recent days, stated it is restricting registrations on the service, citing malicious attacks.
“Due to large-scale malicious attacks on DeepSeek’s services, we are temporarily limiting registrations to ensure continued service,” the company said in an incident report page. “Existing users can log in as usual. Thanks for your understanding & support.”
Busy
Users attempting to sign up for an account are being displayed a similar message, stating “registration may be busy” & that they should wait & try again.
“With the popularity of DeepSeek growing, it’s not a big surprise that they are being targeted by malicious web traffic,” Eric Kron, security awareness advocate at KnowBe4, said in a statement.
“These sorts of attacks could be a way to extort an organisation by promising to stop attacks & restore availability for a fee, it could be rival organisations seeking to negatively impact the competition, or it could even be people who have invested in a competing organisation & want to protect their investment by taking out the competition.”
Upstart
DeepSeek, founded in 2023, is a Chinese upstart that’s “dedicated to making AGI [artificial general intelligence] a reality,” according to a description on its Hugging Face page.
The company has become the ‘talking point’ in the AI world, with its iOS chatbot app reaching the top of Apple’s Top Free Apps chart in the UK & the US this week, surpassing OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Over the past month, the AI research lab has released a series of reasoning & mixture-of-experts language models under an MIT license that it claims can outperform its Silicon Valley rivals while also being trained at a fraction of the cost, something of an achievement in the face of US sanctions that prohibit the sale of advanced AI chips to Chinese companies.
Pre-Training Stage
“During the pre-training stage, training DeepSeek-V3 on each trillion tokens requires only 180K H800 GPU hours, i.e., 3.7 days on our cluster with 2048 H800 GPUs,” the company said in a study.
“Consequently, our pre-training stage is completed in less than 2 months & costs 2664K GPU hours. Combined with 119K GPU hours for the context length extension and 5K GPU hours for post-training, DeepSeek-V3 costs only 2.788M GPU hours for its full training. Assuming the rental price of the H800 GPU is $2 per GPU hour, our total training costs amount to only $5.576M.”
Censor
However, the platform has been found to censor responses to sensitive topics like Tiananmen Square, Taiwan, & the treatment of Uyghurs in China.
Late 2024, security researcher Johann Rehberger disclosed a security flaw in DeepSeek’s chatbot that could have been exploited by a malicious player to take control of a user’s account via a prompt injection attack involving a cross-site scripting (XSS) payload.
Susceptible
Threat intelligence firm Kela, in a report published Monday, disclosed that DeepSeek’s models, despite outperforming those from Meta (Llama) & Anthropic (Claude), are susceptible to ‘evil jailbreak’ persona attacks that allow the chatbot to provide responses to questions that otherwise violate ethical or safety constraints.
This included generating malicious outputs, such as ransomware development, fabricating content, detailed instructions for creating toxins & explosive devices, & code snippets for stealer malware.
Security Concerns
It’s privacy policy also notes that users’ personal information – including device & network connection information, usage patterns, & payment details – are hosted in “secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China,” a move that’s likely to pose fresh national security concerns for Washington amidst the TikTok ban.
China, however, has said it allows internet companies across the world to operate in the country as long as they follow local laws & regulations, & that the Govt. has never asked & will never ask any company or individual to collect or provide data located abroad against local laws.
Impressive
“We are living in a timeline where a non-US company is keeping the original mission of OpenAI alive – truly open, frontier research that empowers all,” said Jim Fan, Senior Research Manager & Lead of Embodied AI (GEAR Lab) at NVIDIA.
OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman called DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model “impressive” & that it’s “legit invigorating to have a new competitor.”
