Chinese AI startup DeepSeek overtakes ChatGPT

DeepSeek’s AI Assistant, a product of Chinese startup DeepSeek, rose to the No. 1 free app rating on Apple’s App Store in the United States on Monday, surpassing competitor ChatGPT. Chinese AI startup DeepSeek overtakes ChatGPT.

The artificial intelligence app, which uses its own DeepSeek-V3 model that its developers say “topped the leaderboard among open-source models and rivaled the most advanced closed-source models in the world,” became hugely popular among U.S. users since its launch on January 10, Sensor Tower, an app data research firm, said.

This milestone highlights how much ground DeepSeek has gained in Silicon Valley, defying long-standing beliefs about American supremacy in AI and raising further questions about the effectiveness of Washington’s export controls designed to restrict China’s access to advanced chips and other AI technologies.

The AI model, like ChatGPT and DeepSeek, needs to power its training with high-performance chips. The Biden administration has in recent years expanded the reach of bans meant to block the export of those chips to China to keep Chinese companies from training AI models.

But DeepSeek researchers said in a paper last month that the DeepSeek-V3 model used Nvidia’s H800 chips in its training, with total expenses coming in at under $6 million. While this claim has been disputed, the argument that they were not as powerful as the pathbreaking Nvidia products targeted by Washington’s export controls has led U.S. tech executives to question whether such restrictions have any effect.

Few people know about the company that created DeepSeek, a small Hangzhou-based start-up that was founded in 2023, the same year that the Chinese search engine giant Baidu introduced its first Chinese AI large-language model.

Since then, many larger and smaller Chinese tech companies have created their own AI models. It’s not the first AI firm to draw plaudits from the U.S. tech establishment for competing with or even outperforming leading U.S. models — but DeepSeek is the first to do so and get raves.