By Kevin Krolicki
BEIJING (Reuters) – From the sharply political to the deeply personal, Chinese internet users have described questions asked of the DeepSeek artificial intelligence app, including what Beijing should do in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s import tariffs.
China’s launch of a ground-breaking AI service from DeepSeek came during the country’s biggest holiday, Lunar New Year, leaving millions of Chinese users with a week of vacation to try the predictive and analytical powers of the new platform that has become a source of national pride and fascination.
Wang Jiangyu, a law professor at City University of Hong Kong whose posts on Weibo are widely followed, tested the model by asking how China should react to Trump’s imposition of 10% tariffs on goods from China.
The seven-point DeepSeek answer covered possible responses from Beijing from targeting industries in states like Michigan and Wisconsin with new tariffs to launching new tax breaks for industries in China. It also suggested China could set technical standards for EV charging that would “build insurmountable barriers for U.S. companies.”
None of those possibilities have been flagged by Chinese policymakers to date.
“The thinking is comprehensive, basically pragmatic and relevant,” Wang said of DeepSeek.
The detailed answer stands in contrast to the blanket way DeepSeek censors the responses to other political questions for Chinese users, including seemingly simple queries like, “Who is Xi Jinping?”
That question and others on hot-button issues for Beijing like the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations prompt DeepSeek to change the subject: “Let’s talk about something else.”
Chen Zhihao, a celebrity stock market commentator, asked DeepSeek for investment advice on Chinese stocks when markets reopen later this week in light of the Trump tariff.
DeepSeek’s response offered a surprise prediction: Beijing, it said, could increase stimulus measures “to hedge against external pressures” or launch new measures to support the tech industry.
DeepSeek’s recent launch of its latest AI models, on par with industry-leading models in the United States at a fraction of the cost, rocked the technology sector over the past week.
The attention also made the Hangzhou-based startup and its founder Liang Wengfeng pop-culture celebrities.
Some Chinese described how they had turned to DeepSeek to tell their fortunes or detail their marriage prospects. One user on RedNote social media app said the AI had offered insight into a previous life based on her dreams. “It really reads my dream,” the user named Qiu Ranran wrote.
DeepSeek’s AI app replaced ChatGPT as most-downloaded in Apple’s App Store over the past week.
In a paper published in December, the Chinese startup said it had trained DeepSeek-V3 with less than $6 million in computing power from Nvidia H800 chips. Some experts have raised questions about that claim.
Even so, DeepSeek’s breakthrough raised doubts about the payoff for the billions of dollars U.S. tech giants have pledged for AI development.
Authorities in Japan, South Korea, France, Italy and Ireland and other countries have also been looking into DeepSeek’s use of personal data.
(Reporting by Kevin Krolicki, Additional reporting by Sophie Yu and Qiaoyi Li in Beijing, Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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