DeepSeek gatecrashes the party, where is fintech heading and does it matter who owns a country's iconic brands?

This week we look at DeepSeek

Oh dear, you shouldn't laugh, really....

There are some red tech faces around at the moment - there you are, selling your expensive ideas, courted by the largest investors, when someone comes along and crashes the party. The Chinese have turned off the music and turned on the lights - is the party now over?

AI investors will now be asking some awkward questions.

They have poured billions into very expensive AI startups and scaleups, sold on the fact that all this artificial thinking needs some expensive chips and development tech, when lo and behold the Chinese come along and do it on the cheap.

The launch of DeepSeek has thrown a spanner in the works, and stock markets have taken a tumble.

For some months now, we've been asking, is the AI bubble about to burst?

The one thing you can say about the AI teams is that they talk a good book. But once you say you can revolutionise the world, you'd better show you can do it and quickly.

The AI bubble was already stretching at the seams and investors, not the most patient of people at the best of times, were starting to wonder what all those billions invested in AI are going to return.

But now, the worry has switched from anti-climax to end-game: the West is paying top dollar, but the East is playing the same game for cents.

DeepSeek is an AI lab funded by a Chinese hedge fund and is changing the key assumptions regarding LLMs. What's more, their AI code is open source and freely available. Most US AI LLMs are not.

And users are flocking to use the DeepSeek service. Why pay ChatGPT 200 a month, or even 20 bucks to get what DeepSeek can offer for free, with a few bells and whistles thrown in?

And Nasdaq darling Nvidia, which produces all those expensive chips that make the magic happen, now looks like a beached whale. Its share price crashed 17% on Monday, wiping an eye-watering $593bn from its market value.

It was not alone, as more than $700bn was stripped from the value of the world’s largest technology companies.

Now the post-mortem has started.

One interesting theory put forward by a US Government tech advisor was that this was a direct consequence of not allowing China the chip technology to build LLMs in the same way as the West. By starving them of the technology, the Chinese have said okay, let's do it our way, out of necessity. And they have.

The repercussions created by DeepSeek's entry into the market are going to reverberate around the tech and other industries for months to come, with potentially game-changing consequences.

The tech world just shifted, but to where, no one’s quite sure yet.

So where now, fintech?

It's 2025 and after a couple of tough years for fintech, where is the industry currently heading: downwards or on the up?

The new year always sees a raft of reports and media on fintech's future fortunes, so it's difficult to figure out whether we're in for better times, or whether the fallow period will remain.

There are reasons to be cheerful, so let's focus on those first. Read more.

Does it matter who owns a country's iconic brands?

As the famous moka coffee pot manufacturer Bialetti, an icon for coffee lovers worldwide and quintessentially Italian, looks set to be acquired by a partly Chinese-owned company, does it matter who actually owns the shares? Read more.