Chinese AI assistant DeepSeek has become the top-rated free app on Apple’s App Store in the US and elsewhere, beating out ChatGPT and other rivals. It utilizes the open source DeepSeek V3 model, which the company claims (debatable) requires far less computing power than its competitors and costs less than $6 million. reportedly developed. At the same time, it offers performance on par with Claude-3.5, GPT-4o and other rivals, DeepSeek said last week.
Available on the web, apps, and APIs, DeepSeek is similar to AI assistants like ChatGPT, with features such as coding content creation and research. The first DeepSeek-R1 release is available under the MIT license, so it can be used commercially without restrictions.
The company is headquartered in Hangzhou, China, and was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, who also started the hedge fund that backed DeepSeek. To develop the technology, he reportedly stockpiled NVIDIA A100 chips before the U.S. embargo and combined them with lower-performance chips that can still be imported, according to MIT Technology Review.
However, DeepSeek remained at a significant hardware disadvantage compared to competing models from OpenAI, Google, and others. This has forced the company to make its AI models more efficient, and it is believed that it can now build and train AI models at a much lower cost than previously thought.
But analysts such as Citi have questioned those claims, noting that China is a “more restrictive environment” for AI development than the United States. Still, DeepSeek’s rise has raised concerns about the potential profits of rivals like OpenAI, which have already invested billions of dollars in AI infrastructure. In fact, news of DeepSeek topping the App Store charts this morning sent tech stocks like NVIDIA and ASML plummeting.
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