The Chinese AI company DeepSeek is making major waves across the tech industry after rising to prominence seemingly overnight. The artificial intelligence tool emerged in the top spot in Apple’s App Store yesterday, above competitors like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini—and on a comparatively tiny timeline and budget. But there’s another way that DeepSeek is quietly outdoing its American competitors: through its branding.

Late last week, DeepSeek released an updated version of its open-source chatbot called DeepSeek-V3, a product that has some tech analysts describing the company’s efforts as “a shot across the bow at the U.S. tech world.” DeepSeek-V3 performs similarly to chatbots like ChatGPT-4o and Meta’s Llama—despite being created in just a few months, being trained on inferior hardware, and requiring a reported budget of just $6 million. (ChatGPT spent $100 million on its latest iteration alone.) The news caused the Nasdaq to tumble by $1 trillion yesterday as markets reacted to the success of the lower-cost LLM challenger.

But the visual representation of this industry disruptor is not a swirling black-void logo à la OpenAI, or even a robot. Instead, it’s a friendly blue whale. This........

© Fast Company