Liang Wenfeng’s DeepSeek AI Is Dying And Disappearing

If you spend any time around developers, AI forums, or tech Twitter, you have seen the phrase everywhere lately: “DeepSeek AI is dying and disappearing.”

A year ago, the same crowd was calling it the biggest threat to OpenAI and the spark of a true open-source revolution.

Today, the playground is half-broken, the updates have stopped, and thousands of projects that bet everything on DeepSeek are quietly migrating away.

This is not just another hype cycle fading.

It is a real collapse, and it carries lessons that every single one of us in tech can learn from.

DeepSeek was started by Liang Wenfeng, a former high-frequency trading genius who once walked away from a Macau poker table with $3.5 million in one night (true story, and still the best trivia about the man).

He built the company inside High-Flyer, his hedge-fund-turned-AI-lab, with a single obsession: make frontier-level models so efficient and cheap that nobody could compete on price.

For a while, it worked better than anyone dreamed. DeepSeek-V3 and R1 models routinely beat far more expensive American rivals on coding, math, and reasoning benchmarks while costing pennies to run.

They open-sourced everything under permissive licenses, and the downloads exploded.

Indie hackers, startups, and even big enterprises started rewriting their stacks around DeepSeek because the math was irresistible.

Then the problems no one wanted to talk about in public started piling up.

Censorship got stricter with every release.

Questions about politics, history, or anything sensitive were met with the same canned refusal.

For users outside China, that was already a red flag; for many inside China, it became unusable for real work.

Hardware reality hit hard. U.S. export controls mean the newest Nvidia chips never reach Chinese labs.

DeepSeek squeezed miracles out of the older H800s, but there is a ceiling you eventually slam into.

The next leap simply was not possible without new silicon.

Money dried up even faster than hardware.

Training and serving these giant models still costs hundreds of millions.

Revenue never came close to covering it because the whole pitch was “basically free.”

Investors who were happy to fund national pride projects suddenly wanted actual profits.

The cash spigot turned off.

Talents started walking.

Top researchers took better offers at Alibaba, ByteDance, Baidu, or even Western labs.

When your best people leave, the magic leaves with them.

One day, the public demo playground just disappeared without warning.

Then the Hugging Face page stopped getting commits.

API prices crept up, then whole regions lost access.

Layoffs hit hard and fast.

The official channels went quiet.

That is when the internet collectively shrugged and said, “Yeah, DeepSeek AI is dying and disappearing.”

Here is where most people are moving right now (real numbers, no fluff):

The bigger picture is what actually matters.

DeepSeek’s story proves that pure technical brilliance is not enough anymore.

You need sustainable economics, trustworthy guardrails (or none at all), and hardware access that is not controlled by geopolitics.

Liang Wenfeng proved you can build something world-changing on a budget most VCs would laugh at.

He also proved that giving it away for free while burning hundreds of millions is a fast path to the graveyard.

DeepSeek is not completely dead yet; there are still servers running, and occasional patches appear, but the momentum is gone, the community has scattered, and the brand everyone trusted six months ago is now a cautionary tale.

If you are building anything today, take this as free advice: never put all your eggs in one model basket, no matter how cheap or shiny it looks.

Keep a backup stack ready, because in AI, heroes can turn into ghosts overnight.

Thanks for reading the straight version of what happened.

At THOUSIF INCORPORATED, we will keep cutting through the noise with stories that actually help you make smarter decisions.

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