A chatbot made by Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek has rocketed to the top of Apple’s App Store charts in the US this week, dethroning OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app. The eponymous AI assistant is powered by DeepSeek’s open-source models, which the company says can be trained at a fraction of the cost using far fewer chips than the world’s leading models. The claim has riled financial markets, sending Nvidia’s shares down over 12 percent in pre-market training,

Downloads for the app exploded shortly after DeepSeek released its new R1 reasoning model on January 20th, which is designed for solving complex problems and reportedly performs as well as OpenAI’s o1 on certain benchmarks. R1 was built on the V3 LLM DeepSeek released in December, which the company claims is on par with GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and cost less than $6 million to develop. By contrast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said GPT-4 cost over $100 million to train.

DeepSeek also claims to have needed only about 2,000 specialized chips from Nvidia to train V3, compared to the 16,000 or more required to train leading models, according to the New York Times. These unverified claims are leading developers and investors to question the compute-intensive approach favored by the world’s leading AI companies. And if true, it means that DeepSeek engineers had to get creative in the face of trade restrictions meant to ensure US domination of AI.

Nvidia, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta are investing billions into AI data centers — $500 billion alone for the Stargate Project, of which $100 billion is thought to be earmarked for Nvidia. Investors and analysts are now wondering if that’s money well spent, with Nvidia, Microsoft, and other companies with substantial stakes in maintaining the AI status quo all trending downward in pre-market trading.

We might have just gotten our best look yet at Apple’s next affordable iPhone SE, shown in both video and photographs of what’s either a real phone or a convincing dummy unit. Despite some reports that the next SE would adopt recent iPhones’ Dynamic Island design, this model appears to stick with the older notch.

Leaker Majin Bu shared a short video over the weekend that shows the new phone in bright daylight, following it up a day later with photos of both white and black versions. Like previous iPhone SE models there’s only a single rear camera, though this appears to be the first in the line to feature a USB-C port — now a requirement for the phone to be sold in the EU.

The biggest surprise is that the phone features Apple’s older notched display, rather than the Dynamic Island design that leaker Evan Blass had tipped it to include. This is hard to make out clearly in the video, but the selfie camera’s position just left of centre matches the iPhone 14’s notched setup — and besides, the leaker himself has confirmed in replies to the post that there’s a notch.

This isn’t our first look at the new SE, though it is our clearest. Sonny Dickson shared two photos of similar looking SE 4 dummy units two weeks ago that he then put on sale.

The SE 4 is rumored to switch to an OLED display, and is expected to include enough RAM to support Apple Intelligence features. Rumors point to a launch around March or April, which makes sense — the SE 3 launched in March 2022.