Hot Topic: Deep Seek is a hot topic, and South Korea is also restricting its use in government ministries and companies.

As concerns grow around the world about generative AI (artificial intelligence) developed by Chinese startup DeepSeek, government ministries and companies in South Korea are also moving to impose regulations.
Deepseek is said to collect information about users' devices, IP addresses, keyboard input patterns, and other data and store it on servers in China, raising security concerns.
Deepseek is attracting attention as a conversational AI service along with ChatGPT and Gemini. As soon as the latest language model "R1" was released on the 20th of last month, Ap
It is the most downloaded free app on Apple's App Store. An unknown Chinese startup's AI is comparable to cutting-edge American AI products, despite its low cost.
This is seen as a threat to the dominance of American companies, which have been world leaders in the field of AI, and on January 27th, the US stock market fell sharply, especially in AI-related stocks.
Shares of AI semiconductor giant Nvidia fell 17% on the same day, the largest one-day drop in nearly five years since mid-March 2020, when the COVID-19 virus was first spreading.
In addition, AI-related stocks generally fell sharply, with Alphabet down 4%, Microsoft down 2%, and the US semiconductor giant Broadcom down 17%.
The biggest feature of Deepseek is its low development and operation costs. The development cost was about 5.6 million dollars (about 870 million yen), and the US Op
Despite being about one-tenth the size of OpenAI's ChatGPT, it is said to have performance comparable to ChatGPT. In addition, only about 140 researchers were involved in its development.
This is a much smaller number than the more than 1,000 people at Open AI. Meanwhile, China's National Intelligence Law requires Chinese companies and citizens to cooperate with intelligence activities.
It has been pointed out that the use of deep seeks could allow information to be extracted by the Chinese side. Due to such concerns, companies and government agencies around the world have begun to take measures such as restricting their use.
The Italian government announced that it would restrict access, and Taiwan has also banned its use in public institutions. Japan has not restricted its use, but on the 3rd, the government's Personal Information Protection Commission announced that it would require caution when using the service.
The company posted a statement on its website urging caution, saying that data, including personal information, will be stored on servers in China and will be subject to Chinese law.
The committee said, "Different from other services, there are some points to keep in mind." In addition, the committee said that Deepseek's privacy policy is only available in Chinese and English.
In response to this, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi stated that Deepseek's privacy policy is for Japanese users.
He explained that the information was provided from the perspective of protecting personal information in order to make it easier to understand, as it is not easy to grasp the contents of the information. He then called on the public to "pay attention to it."
In South Korea, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy have blocked access to Deepseek through their own decision-making committees. In addition, the state-run Korea Hydro & Electro-Power Co., Ltd. took measures to ban its use this month.
This response is also spreading to companies, with IT giant Kakao and telecommunications giant LG U+ banning the use of deep seeking for business purposes.
According to a report by South Korea's public broadcaster KBS, which analyzed app usage, Wise Up Retail,
The number of weekly users in the country in the fourth week of last month was 1.21 million, second only to ChatGPT, which had 4.93 million users. The Korean government has not taken measures to ban the use of Deepseek itself.
On the 4th, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety sent a public document to central government agencies and local governments urging caution in the use of generative AI, including Deep Seek.
The document reportedly includes a message urging people to refrain from entering personal information when using these services for business purposes and not to blindly trust the results presented.