DeepSeek: China takes global AI market by storm, ChatGPT loses its top spot in…, US now plans to…, but what is it? How does it work

DeepSeek's latest release, R1, rivals industry leaders such as OpenAI and Anthropic but stands out for being cost-efficient, open source, and offering unlimited free usage.

New Delhi: China’s DeepSeek generates massive user interest, causing a significant ripple effect on global tech stocks. Surpassing ChatGPT, the Chinese artificial intelligence app has claimed the top spot in Apple’s App Store productivity category across key markets. DeepSeek’s latest release, R1, rivals industry leaders such as OpenAI and Anthropic but stands out for being cost-efficient, open source, and offering unlimited free usage. It enables high-performance AI access without the steep costs typically associated with such technologies, according to a NDTV report.

Commenting on the Chinese company’s accomplishment, Perplexity founder & CEO Aravind Srinivas congratulated DeepSeek, and noted on X: “For a while, it wasn’t clear who would beat ChatGPT for the first time. The best we (Perplexity) could manage was #8, a year ago. Look forward to using all their (DeepSeek’s) models for search, assistant, and agents this year.”

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the marquee venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and an adviser to US President Donald Trump, described DeepSeek’s accomplishment as “AI’s Sputnik moment,” making a reference to a period of anxiety among Western nations about a possible technological gap between the US and the Soviet Union when the latter launched the Sputnik satellite.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made an indirect reference to it. Speaking at the World Economic Forum, he said, “We should take the developments out of China very, very seriously.”

All you need to know about China’s DeepSeek:

• DeepSeek is a Hangzhou-based AI research lab and the R1 is its latest AI model.
• The company was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, an engineer and entrepreneur with a background in AI and quantitative finance
• Liang’s team at DeepSeek mostly consists of fresh graduates from top Chinese universities like Tsinghua and Peking University.
• The company has now developed AI models that are open-source and helping developers across the world to improve their technologies.
• It is powered by the open-source DeepSeek-V3 model, which its researchers claim was developed for less than $6m (£7.5m)
• What makes its achievement noteworthy has been its ability to make a ChatGPT-class language model at a fraction of ChatGPT’s cost.
• DeepSeek’s R1 AI model is said to match or even beat the likes of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini on multiple parameters.
• What’s more, it’s free, unlike ChatGPT that has a very limited free version.

Nvidia shares sink as Chinese AI app takes market by storm

US tech giant Nvidia saw its value drop by over a sixth as the rising popularity of a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) app unsettled investors across the US and Europe. The unexpected rise of DeepSeek triggered a sharp decline in market valuations for AI-focused companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google, on Monday.