On Monday, the stock market went into a tizzy over a new AI model from Chinese company DeepSeek. It seemed to be just as powerful as many of its American competitors, but its makers claimed to have made it far more cheaply, using far less computing power than similar AI apps like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. In one day, hundreds of billions of dollars were wiped off the valuations of companies related to AI.This week, investors seemed suddenly to change their minds about what our AI future would look like and which companies will (or won't) profit from it. Will we really need all those high-end computer chips, after all? What about power plants to provide electricity for all the energy-hungry AI data centers? On today's show – how DeepSeek might have changed the economics of artificial intelligence forever.This episode was produced by Willa Rubin with an assist from James Sneed. It was edited by Keith Romer and engineered by Neil Tevault. Research help from Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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Just a note, in this episode, we will at some point talk about specific AI and tech companies, including Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic, all of which are current financial supporters of NPR. Here's the show. This is Planet Money from NPR. Imagine us at Planet Money, rolling out of bed late on Monday morning, still in our cozy pajamas.
Yeah, we got our Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle slippers on. We got our cup of coffee.
Big yawn, turn on the old TV, and oh my, what is happening in the stock market right now? Uh, yeah. the single largest loss in a day of market capitalization in history.
What was happening? It was apparently some kind of AI apocalypse? Okay, so AI apocalypse, not so sure about that. Okay, fine, whatever. But without a doubt, this is a monumental shift.
Yeah, because on Monday, AI-related stocks started plummeting and TV-related people started grasping for big metaphors. It was an earthquake today in the world of artificial intelligence. The seismic AI event, a new-ish AI model from a company called DeepSeek.
Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Mary Childs.
And I'm Kenny Malone. Today on the show, call it an artificial intelligence earthquake, call it an AI apocalypse, but Monday was not just a market freakout. I mean, it was that. Markets lost hundreds of billions of dollars, but it was also a teachable moment.
Oh, yes. Because if we look at these specific companies that got slammed on Monday and a few that benefited, we can see pretty clearly what people with money are betting our AI future looks like. And this week, the AI model from Deepsea has them betting on a very different looking future.
Or as Jim Cramer so artfully put it. This week has been a tectonic shift in assumptions about how the world is going to look. So let us first discuss how those assumptions became assumed. We shall visit a simpler ancient time.
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