DeepSeek's glory: the lonely "Six Little Dragons" | AI Light Years

After DeepSeek shocked the industry with its low-cost DeepSeek-V3, which is comparable to GPT-4o in performance, it released the R1 model on January 20. Six days after its launch, it topped the Apple App Store's global download list, and the cumulative downloads exceeded 110 million times within one month of its launch. During this period, major cloud vendors quickly launched open source versions of V3 and R1, and products such as Baidu Search and WeChat are actively embracing DeepSeek.

The Kimi global reinforcement learning model k1.5 and step reasoning model Step R-mini, which were released at the same time as DeepSeek, are close to o1 in many aspects of model capabilities, but they are still drowned out by the hot public opinion about DeepSeek.

Compared with the noise of DeepSeek, the "Six Little Dragons" also broke news one after another: Zero One Everything was further split, the budget and arbitration case of Dark Side of the Moon were not settled, and another senior executive of MIniMax resigned...

Behind this are the frustrated VCs: none of the projects backed by real money has reached the popularity of DeepSeek. Currently, four of the "Six Little Dragons" have not released any financing news for more than half a year. In 2024, the industry said that two of the "Six Little Dragons" have fallen behind. In 2025, who will be the next to fall behind?

Only three companies remain rooted in the big model

The popularity of DeepSeek was not without signs. Since the launch of its first model, DeepSeek Coder, on November 2, 2023, more than 10 different versions of the model have been launched in more than a year. Among them, the V2 model released in May last year is comparable to GPT-4 Turbo in performance, but the price is only 1% of GPT-4. Therefore, DeepSeek is called the "price butcher" and the "Pinduoduo of the AI ​​world", and it has also set off the first round of price wars in the large model industry.

On January 27, 2025, DeepSeek surpassed ChatGPT and topped the Apple APP Store free list in China and the United States, attracting global attention. What made DeepSeek achieve such success was its large inference model DeepSeek-R1. According to the information released by DeepSeek, R1 scored close to the official version of o1 in many authoritative tests, and even scored higher than the official version of o1 in some tests.

In addition to the rankings, open source + cost-effectiveness are the key factors that have made DeepSeek so popular. Influenced by DeepSeek, Baidu founder Robin Li, who once believed in closed source, also announced that he would join the open source team. OpenAI founder Sam Altman also reflected that the company has always been on the "wrong side" in terms of open source strategy.

MiniMax, one of the "Six Little Dragons" with large models, released its first open source model on January 15. Its founder Yan Junjie also said in an interview with "Late Post" that "I don't have a lot of experience in my first startup. If I could do it again, I would open source it on the first day." Among the other five little dragons, only Zhipu was the first to walk on two legs: open source and closed source. After nearly two years of hard work, the development direction of the "Six Little Dragons" has gone in opposite directions.

Zero One Wanwu is the first basic big model company to publicly make major adjustments. It first laid off the pre-training algorithm team and the Infra team, and some employees joined Alibaba by jumping ship. Later, it announced the establishment of an industrial big model joint laboratory and an industrial big model base with Alibaba Cloud and Suzhou High-tech Zone respectively.

In terms of personnel, Huang Wenhao, the person in charge of model training, Lan Yuchuan, who is in charge of the big model API open platform, and Cao Dapeng, the person in charge of productivity products, have all resigned. Zero One Thing, which tried to stay at the table, could not cover up its decline in this round of big model competition.

Baichuan Intelligence has made it clear that it will enter the medical field in 2024, and recently launched its first "AI pediatrician". Baichuan does not seem to be doing well in To B commercialization. Its co-founder and head of commercialization, Hong Tao, left the company years ago. According to an employee of Baichuan, it is indeed not as expected. "Now that we have DeepSeek, the pressure this year has only increased."

Another person who resigned as the head of To B commercialization was Wei Wei of MiniMax. Previously, Wei Wei said in an interview that many B-side customers would not easily pay to support the revenue of large model companies. They could only rely on R&D and algorithm capabilities to help customers align output effects in actual scenarios, which also proved that the commercialization of large models is not easy.

It seems that the only companies that are still focusing on large-scale model technology innovation and the pursuit of AGI are Darkside of the Moon, Zhipu, and Step-Star. Influenced by DeepSeek, Step-Star has also joined the open source camp, but unlike DeepSeek, which focuses on text models, Step-Star's latest open source models are two multimodal models - Step-Video-T2V and Step-Audio.

In the early morning of February 23, Dark Side of the Moon published its latest paper "Muon is Scalable for LLM Training" and open-sourced the MoE model Moonlight, which only requires 3B parameters for model activation. Many industry insiders believe that this is "intercepting the open source week" because DeepSeek announced earlier that it would release open source projects for 5 consecutive days.

For Dark Side of the Moon, the most pressing issue may be its Kimi products, which it has invested heavily in.

It is difficult to become a leader in the rankings by spending money on traffic

Like the big model "Six Little Dragons", DeepSeek also has a C-end product with the same name, which did not attract much attention in the market in the first week after its launch. According to data disclosed by QuestMobile to the media, from January 13 to January 19, 2025, the weekly download volume of DeepSeek App was only 285,000, far less than Doubao (4.52 million) and Kimi (1.557 million).

After the release of R1 on January 20, 2025, DeepSeek downloads began to grow steeply. Sensor Tower research showed that DeepSeek was downloaded more than 16 million times within 18 days of the launch, almost twice the 9 million times when OpenAI's ChatGPT was first released.

The surge in visits caused DeepSeek to crash, but even so, the growth momentum is still strong, with monthly downloads exceeding 110 million. No one can ignore the brilliance of DeepSeek. At the ByteDance internal staff meeting on February 13, CEO Liang Ruobo talked about DeepSeek and reflected on the fact that the follow-up speed was not fast enough, and this year he would pursue intelligent online.

Tencent's WeChat grayscale test connected DeepSeek's AI search, and after the usage exceeded expectations, it called on the AI ​​application Yuanbao to support WeChat search. On February 22, Tencent Yuanbao surpassed ByteDance's Doubao and rose to the second place in the Apple free APP download rankings in China, while DeepSeek continued to top the list.

The "big brother" of the first and second place changed hands in just one month, forcing Doubao and Kimi, who burned money for growth, to lose their advantages. The difference between the two is that the former was born with a "golden key" and the latter is a "new entrepreneur". According to previous media estimates, Kimi's daily investment in the iPhone channel alone is close to 200,000, while Doubao's is 2.48 million.

Under the influence of DeepSeek, Dark Side of the Moon was recently reported to have drastically cut its product launch budget, including suspending launches on multiple Android channels and cooperation with third-party advertising platforms. According to an insider who revealed to AI Light Years, the promotion was indeed adjusted accordingly, "There are natural additions, but they cannot be compared with the growth of DeepSeek."

Kimi's current troubles are more than these: "Undercurrent Waves" has exclusively learned that the long-pending Kimi arbitration case has not been settled as expected, but has entered the next process of the arbitration case. According to insiders: The two parties in Kimi's arbitration case, the old shareholders of Circular Intelligence and Yang Zhilin, have paid the fees at HKIAC (Hong Kong International Arbitration Center) at the end of January and late February respectively, and the court formation has been completed. And Zhang Yutong, the more critical protagonist behind the whole incident, may be sued separately.

MiniMax also has high hopes for To C products, because its star product Talkie became the fourth most downloaded AI application in the United States in the first half of 2024, which made it taste the sweetness. But the good times did not last long. In mid-December, Talkie quietly disappeared from the Apple App Store in the US market, while the Android platform was not affected.

Jieyuexingchen, Zero One Everything, Zhipu AI and Baichuan Intelligence also have their own AI application products, but according to the AI ​​product list, in January 2025, none of the top 20 AI applications with monthly active users are related to these four manufacturers. Previously, an employee of Baichuan Intelligence told AI Light Years, "It is not surprising that Baixiaoying's user retention and growth are very poor. We basically do not advertise, and let other companies spend money to complete user education first."

Currently, DeepSeek, Tencent Yuanbao, and Byte Doubao occupy the top three of Apple's free APP download rankings. If the "six little dragons" of large models want to be on the list, the competition will only become more intense. Zhou Hongyi is personally promoting Nano Search, which is currently ranked seventh.

Another competitor that cannot be ignored is Alibaba. After AI application Tongyi was incorporated into Alibaba Intelligent Information Business Group, Alibaba's AI To C business recently launched a large-scale recruitment, with hundreds of positions, focusing on product and technology research and development positions related to AI big models. There are wolves in front and tigers behind, which is a true portrayal of the current situation of the "Six Little Dragons" of big models.

When the technology story is no longer romantic, commercialization is not as expected, and the monthly active user growth of the product is not proportional to the investment, the big model of "Six Little Dragons" is full of ideals but skinny in reality.

The threshold for the next round of financing will be raised

It is a recognized fact that pre-training of large models is expensive. Kai-Fu Lee once revealed that the cost of pre-training is about three to four million US dollars. Even the lower-cost Yi-Lightning used 2,000 GPUs for training, which took one and a half months and cost more than three million US dollars.

Even though DeepSeek claims to be low-cost, its initial investment is difficult to estimate. The third-party organization SemiAnalysis estimates that DeepSeek actually has a huge reserve of computing power: a total of 60,000 NVIDIA GPU cards, including 10,000 A100s, 10,000 H100s, 10,000 "special edition" H800s, and 30,000 "special edition" H20s.

"We estimate the training cost of a general large model to be around US$1 billion. This is only the computing power part, and does not include two other very expensive parts: data and labor costs. Talent in the field of large models is very scarce around the world now." Dr. Du Feng, founding partner of Jiangmen Venture Capital and former head of Microsoft Ventures Greater China, once told the author.

Due to the high investment required, a popular saying has been popular in the industry for a long time: the entry ticket to invest in large-scale model companies is 100 million US dollars. Another signal behind this saying is that a large-scale model startup company will find it difficult to survive if it cannot get financing.

After the 100-model war started in 2023, there was financing news released almost every month. However, as the AI ​​bubble theory became more and more popular, there was no hot money of hundreds of millions flowing into the "Six Little Dragons" of large models for a long time since September 2024. It was not until before the Spring Festival in 2025 that Zhipu and Jieyuexingchen announced that they had received "winter money". The former announced the completion of a new round of 3 billion yuan financing, and the latter completed the B round of financing of hundreds of millions of dollars.

It has been more than half a year since the last financing update of the other four of the "Six Little Dragons": MiniMax officially announced the completion of US$600 million in Series B financing in March last year, Baichuan Intelligence obtained 5 billion yuan in Series A financing in July last year, Zero One Everything completed a new round of financing of hundreds of millions of dollars in August last year, and Dark Side of the Moon completed US$300 million in financing in August last year.

During the Spring Festival, DeepSeek became popular all over the world, and the public was full of praise for DeepSeek and its founder Liang Wenfeng. In the venture capital circle, there have been a lot of news about whether DeepSeek will start financing and what its valuation will be.

Earlier, there was news that Alibaba would invest $1 billion to hold a 10% stake at a valuation of $10 billion. In response, Alibaba Vice President Yan Qiao quickly refuted the rumor through WeChat Moments, saying, "The news circulating that Alibaba invested in DeepSeek is fake news." Later, foreign media reported that "DeepSeek is considering raising external funds for the first time." People related to DeepSeek refuted the rumor, saying that the financing news was all rumors.

"Many investors have approached Liang Wenfeng directly or through connections. I predict that the valuation should be far higher than the current 'Big Six Little Dragons'." An investor from CICC Capital said, "DeepSeek has become a benchmark. The threshold for the Big Six Little Dragons to obtain new financing in the primary market is obviously higher."

In fact, since the start of the big model entrepreneurship boom, the industry generally does not believe that the "Six Little Dragons" can finally survive as independent "big model companies". Several founders of the "Six Little Dragons" have also expressed similar views in public. For example, Yan Junjie, the founder of MiniMax, believes that there will only be five big model companies left in the world in the future.

"China will definitely have its own ChatGPT. Just like search engines, we have our own compliance requirements. But the Chinese version of ChatGPT will only be produced by five companies: BAT + ByteDance + Huawei." Cheng Hao, founder of Xunlei and Yuanwang Capital, once told the author.

With the continued popularity, the "Six Little Dragons" that were already heading towards differentiation will accelerate the reshuffle.