DeepSeek is not slowing down and now it's coming for AI image generators such as Midjourney and DALL-E

(Image credit: Adobe Stock)

DeepSeek has released a new family of multimodal LLMs
The new Janus-Pro family is available for developers now
Sign-ups to DeepSeek are still paused due to "large-scale malicious attacks"

After deposing ChatGPT from its no.1 slot on the iOS App Store, newcomer DeepSeek has announced that it is releasing a new set of multimodal models that can outperform even DALL-E 3.

The new models aren’t available to use for consumers right now, but can be downloaded from the AI development platform Hugging Face. The models form part of a family that DeepSeek is calling Janus-Pro, and we’d imagine that image generation could be a new feature that is added to the DeepSeek chatbot in the coming weeks.

In a post on Hugging Face, DeepSeek writes “Janus-Pro surpasses previous unified model and matches or exceeds the performance of task-specific models. The simplicity, high flexibility, and effectiveness of Janus-Pro make it a strong candidate for next-generation unified multimodal models.”

Market disruption

The AI industry was already reeling from the release of the DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model, even before the news that DeepSeek is seemingly moving into AI image generation next. R1 is of equivalent ability to OpenAI’s ChatGPT-o1 LLM, but can be used by developers at a fraction of the price, and is free to use via the website and app chatbot. It also runs much more cheaply and efficiently.

While OpenAI's Sam Altman welcomed the release, posting on X, “it's legit invigorating to have a new competitor!”, the market responded to news that it was possible to develop AI much more cheaply with tech stock falling significantly in value. US President Donald Trump called DeepSeek “a wakeup call”.

The biggest loss suffered by a tech company in terms of stock so far seems to be Nvidia, which saw a massive $600 billion drop.

Sign-ups to DeepSeek are currently paused. A message on its new service status page says: "Due to large-scale malicious attacks on DeepSeek's services, we are temporarily limiting registrations to ensure continued service. Existing users can log in as usual. Thanks for your understanding and support."

We've already pitted DeepSeek against ChatGPT to see which is best, and concluded that it is an "incredibly promising start to a genuine challenger for OpenAI’s AI crown". What comes next is anyone's guess.