Chinese AI Startup DeepSeek Overtakes ChatGPT on App Store, Rattles Global Tech Stocks
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek dethrones ChatGPT as the top free app on the U.S. Apple App Store, triggering a massive global tech stock sell-off. The company achieves this milestone with its R1 reasoning model, which reportedly operates at a fraction of the cost of Western competitors.
Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek overtakes OpenAI's ChatGPT to become the most-downloaded free app on the U.S. Apple App Store. This sudden shift causes global tech stocks to plummet, putting the market on pace to wipe out billions in market capitalization. However, DeepSeek temporarily limits new user registrations due to large-scale malicious attacks on its services.
DeepSeek operates as an AI research spinoff from the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer and focuses on achieving artificial general intelligence. The current buzz centers on its R1 reasoning model, which rivals OpenAI's o1 and is open-source for any developer to use. Like other Chinese chatbots, the application features content limitations and avoids answering questions about sensitive political topics.
A major point of discussion in the tech industry involves the surprisingly low development cost of the R1 model. Analysts estimate the training costs at just $5.6 million, which is less than ten percent of the cost to train Meta's Llama model. This impressive efficiency stands out because DeepSeek achieves these results despite three years of U.S. export curbs on advanced chips to China.