ChatGPT has been ruling the generative AI industry for a while now, and OpenAI has gathered ample attention, but a new contender is raising the bar when it comes to developing the technology. A new China-based AI chatbot called DeepSeek has amassed millions of downloads on Apple's App Store, beating the likes of ChatGPT and the rest of the competition. DeepSeek has taken the number one spot in various countries, including the United States, which has challenged Silicon Valley's dominance in the AI industry.
DeepSeek surpasses ChatGPT on the App Store in various regions, including the United States
DeepSeek was released last week on the iOS App Store, and in this short span of time, the app has managed to match, if not exceed, the performance of ChatGPT. The interesting bit is that DeepSeek required only a fraction of the development cost, according to a research paper released earlier this week. If you are not familiar with what happened backstage, DeepSeek did not raise funds externally or make efforts to monetize from its R1 model. The app was founded by a hedge fund manager, Liang Wenfeng, who claimed that the company used only 2,048 NVIDIA H800s and $5.6 million to train R1 with 671 million parameters.
In comparison, DeepSeek spent just a fraction of the cost on development against billions of dollars for performance, which is pretty comparable with the giants of the industry. For comparison, Microsoft and Meta have committed to spend over $65 billion each this year for AI development and its infrastructure. Moreover, OpenAI also stated last week that it would create a joint venture with Stargate with an estimated budget of $100 billion for AI infrastructure in the United States.
Marc Andreessen is already praising DeepSeek, stating that the company has achieved an impressive breakthrough with its functionality and ability to showcase reasoning to prompts. Moreover, much like ChatGPT, DeepSeek has also adopted an open-source approach, which will allow developers to inspect and build on the AI technology.
DeepSeek's success indicates that Chinese developers have found a way to create efficient AI models using very limited resources. This also means that AI infrastructure does not require massive investments. We will share more details on DeepSeek and its updates, so be sure to stay tuned.
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