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On January 27th, 2025, the AI industry experienced a seismic change.
Rather than users discussing OpenAI’s newest feature, Operator, launched just a few days earlier on January 23rd, they were instead rushing to the App Store to download DeepSeek, China’s answer to ChatGPT.
There has been so much interest in DeepSeek, that as TechCrunch reported, it took over the top spot as #1 in the Apple App Store — and surpassed ChatGPT. According to CNBC, this means it’s the most downloaded app that is available for free in the U.S. App Store.
However, given the fact that DeepSeek seemingly appeared from thin air, many people are trying to learn more about what this tool is, what it can do, and what it means for the world of AI.
Take a closer look at DeepSeek, what it is, and why it’s disrupting the AI industry.
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According to Reuters, DeepSeek is a Chinese startup AI company. On the 20th of January, the company launched its AI model, DeepSeek-R1.
About a month earlier in December 2024, DeepSeek had released DeepSeek-V3 according to TechCrunch.
DeepSeek claims its most recent models, DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3 are as good as industry-leading models from competitors OpenAI and Meta.
DeepSeek first attracted the attention of AI enthusiasts before gaining more traction and hitting the mainstream on the 27th of January.
Essentially, it is a chatbot that rivals ChatGPT, was developed in China, and was released for free. The version of DeepSeek that is powering the free app in the AppStore is DeepSeek-V3.
DeepSeek claims its models are cheaper to make. DeepSeek cost about $5.58 million, as noted by Reuters, whereas ChatGPT-4 reportedly cost more than $100 million to make according to the BBC.
Reuters highlighted that DeepSeek-R1 is also reportedly substantially less expensive to use than OpenAI o1, about “20 to 50 times cheaper.”
Additionally as noted by TechCrunch, the company claims to have made the DeepSeek chatbot using lower-quality microchips.
Yet, despite supposedly lower development and usage costs, and lower-quality microchips the results of DeepSeek’s models have skyrocketed it to the top position in the App Store.
It’s important to note that some analysts have expressed skepticism about whether the development costs are accurate, or whether the real cost is higher.
As you might imagine, a high-quality Chinese AI chatbot could be incredibly disruptive for an AI industry that has been heavily dominated by innovations from OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, and Perplexity AI.
One of the reasons DeepSeek has already proven to be incredibly disruptive is that the tool seemingly came out of nowhere.
Many believed China to be behind in the AI race after its first significant attempt with the release of Baidu, as reported by Time.
Further, the US had been restricting the advanced AI chip technology that China had access to. So, many may have believed it would be difficult for China to create a high-quality AI that rivalled companies like OpenAI.
Then, in tandem with AI chip considerations, development cost is another cause of the disruption.
DeepSeek claims to have made the tool with a $5.58 million investment, if accurate, this would represent a fraction of the cost that companies like OpenAI have spent on model development.
As such, the rise of DeepSeek has had a major impact on the US stock market.
Forbes reported that NVIDIA set records and saw a $589 billion loss as a result, while other major stocks like Broadcom (another AI chip company) also suffered big losses.
It also disrupted the wider stock market as a whole, as the S&P 500 (a fund containing the US’s top 500 companies) also dropped 1.5%.
Given the impact DeepSeek has already had on the AI industry, it’s easy to think it might be a well-established AI competitor, but that isn’t the case at all.
In fact, DeepSeek isn’t more than two years old and was founded in 2023.
The founder behind DeepSeek is Liang Wenfeng. According to Forbes, DeepSeek released its first product late in 2023, in November, although the BBC reported its first LLM (large language model) was launched in 2024.
Despite the monumental publicity DeepSeek has generated, very little is actually known about Liang, which differs greatly from the other main players in the AI industry.
Mr. Liang’s background is in finance, and he is the CEO of High-Flyer, a hedge fund that uses AI to review financial data for investment purposes.
In recent interviews, Liang has mentioned the importance that China stops following in the AI industry and becomes a leader, stating that China’s AI sector “cannot remain a follower forever.”
Let’s take a closer look at some of the key company facts and statistics for DeepSeek.
According to TechCrunch, DeepSeek’s mobile app has been downloaded 2.6 million times combined — from both the App Store and Google Play.
SimilarWeb notes that Deepseek.com has had 11.8 million visits in December 2024. However, considering the spike in interest in DeepSeek in January 2025, it will be interesting to see how this data changes month-on-month.
Where, did that traffic come from? Let’s look at Deepseek.com’s top traffic sources in December 2024:
As of December 2024, SimilarWeb notes that DeepSeek.com is the most popular in the following countries:
According to SimilarWeb, Deepseek.com receives the most traffic from the following social media platforms as of December 2024:
SimilarWeb notes that Deepseek.com receives the most traffic from the 25-34-year-old age group as of December 2024:
The gender distribution for Deepseek.com in December 2024 according to SimilarWeb data is:
The top 3 keywords for Deepseek.com as of December 2024 were:
Given its abrupt burst onto the scene, it is difficult to predict what the future implications of DeepSeek will have on the AI industry.
However, it seems DeepSeek is already facing hurdles. On January 27th, a separate report by Reuters stated that it was necessary to restrict registrations for the DeepSeek tool due to major cyber issues described as “large-scale malicious attacks.”
One thing is for sure — digital transparency and authenticity are becoming more and more important in the age of AI.
We have also found that DeepSeek is detectable by the proprietary Originality.ai AI Checker in our Is DeepSeek Detectable Study.
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