Chinese AI assistant DeepSeek has become the highest-rated free app on Apple’s App Store in the United States and elsewhere, beating out ChatGPT and other competitors. It’s powered by the open source DeepSeek V3 model, which reportedly requires significantly less computing power than its competitors and was developed for less than $6 million, according to the company’s (disputed) claims. At the same time, it provides performance on par with Claude-3.5, GPT-4o and other rivals, DeepSeek said last week.
Available on web, app, and API, DeepSeek is similar to AI Assistant like ChatGPT with features like creating and searching coding content. Its first version DeepSeek-R1 is available under the MIT license, so it can be used commercially and without restrictions.
The company is headquartered in Hangzhou, China and was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, who also launched the hedge fund backing DeepSeek. To develop this technology, it allegedly stockpiled NVIDIA A100 chips before the US export ban and combined them with less powerful chips that can still be imported, according to MIT Technology Review.
However, DeepSeek was still at a hardware disadvantage compared to competing models from OpenAI, Google and others. This forced the company to be more efficient with its AI models, and it would have been able to build and train them at a much lower cost than previously thought possible.
Analysts at Citi and elsewhere have questioned these claimshowever, and pointed out that China constitutes a “more restrictive environment” for AI development than the United States. Still, DeepSeek’s rise has raised concerns about the potential profits of competitors like OpenAI, which have already invested billions in AI infrastructure. In fact, news that DeepSeek topped the App Store charts caused tech stocks like NVIDIA and ASML to drop sharply this morning.
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