The Chinese AI assistant DeepSeek has become the best rated free app in Apple’s App Store in the US and elsewhere, beating ChatGPT and other competitors. It is based on the open source model DeepSeek V3, which reportedly requires far less processing power than the competition and was developed for less than $6 million, according to reports.controversial) Claims of the company. At the same time it offers performance at eye level with Claude-3.5, GPT-4o and other competitors, DeepSeek said last week.
Available on web, app and API, DeepSeek is similar to AI Assistant like ChatGPT with features such as coding content creation and research. The first DeepSeek R1 version is available under an MIT license and can therefore be used commercially and without restrictions.
The company is headquartered in Hangzhou, China and was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, who also founded the hedge fund behind DeepSeek. To develop the technology, he reportedly already had NVIDIA A100 chips in stock earlier this year US export and paired these with less powerful chips that can still be imported, they say MIT Technology Review.
However, DeepSeek still had a significant 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 was reportedly able to create and train them at a far lower cost than previously thought possible.
Analysts at Citi and elsewhere have done so questioned these claimshowever, pointing out that China is a “more restrictive environment” for AI development than the US. 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, the news that DeepSeek topped the App Store charts caused a sharp decline in technology stocks like NVIDIA and ASML this morning.
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