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The Nasdaq logo is displayed at the Nasdaq Market site in Times Square in New York City, US. File photo: JEENAH MOON/REUTERS
The Nasdaq logo is displayed at the Nasdaq Market site in Times Square in New York City, US. File photo: JEENAH MOON/REUTERS

When someone describes the recent 3% drop in the Nasdaq caused by the Chinese AI app DeepSeek in this manner: “To say the Nasdaq fell off the cliff is an understatement”, you know you are in the presence of DeepBS (“DeepSeek ushers in a new age of cheaper AI models”, January 31). What idiocy leads anyone to refer to the recent drop of a few percentage points as “the bubble didn’t burst, it blew up”?

I’ll tell you when the bubble blew up: in 2022 the Nasdaq dropped 33%. Since then it has gone up 90%. Over the past 10 years the Nasdaq has shown an average increase of 21% per annum, which has outperformed pretty well every fee-grabbing, self-important “asset manager” and “investment adviser” in the world.

In the past two years Nvidia has risen more than 500%, so a drop of 16% is hardly the end of capitalism!

And where exactly did we get the figure of $6m that has been bandied about as the cost of developing DeepSeek? Well, that’s the figure given to us by the Chinese company itself, so of course it must be true!

That the media accepts this fantasy figure as gospel is almost as silly as announcing the collapse of theV. 

As for the app itself, try asking it about the Tiananmen Square protests against the Chinese government, or about Taiwan. Strangely, it knows nothing about these, and replies: “Let’s talk about something else”.

Jonathan Schrire
Kenilworth

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