Australian Minister for Industry and Science Ed Husic yesterday raised privacy concerns over China’s breakout artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot DeepSeek (深度求索), urging users to think carefully before downloading it.
Developed by a China-based technology start-up, the DeepSeek chatbot has astounded industry insiders and upended financial markets since it was released last week.
Praised for its ability to match Western competitors at a fraction of the cost, DeepSeek has surged to the top of app download charts, displacing market leader ChatGPT. The start-up said on Monday it was limiting the registration of new users due to large-scale cyberattacks on its services.
Photo: Reuters
While DeepSeek has shown the ability to match the capacity of AI pace-setters such as Nvidia Corp, Husic urged caution.
“There are a lot of questions that will need to be answered in time on quality, consumer preferences, data and privacy management,” Husic told national broadcaster ABC. “I would be very careful about that. These types of issues need to be weighed up carefully.”
Husic said Chinese companies sometimes differed from Western rivals when it came to user privacy and data management.
“The Chinese are very good at developing products that work very well. That market is accustomed to their approaches on data and privacy,” he said.
“The minute you export it to markets where consumers have different expectations around privacy and data management, the question is whether those products will be embraced in the same way. I think you have to be careful, I’m just being completely frank and direct on that,” Husic said.
Australia in 2018 banned Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies Co (華為) from its national 5G network, citing national security concerns.
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