DeepSeek Overtakes ChatGPT in App Rankings

News Desk

Islamabad: On Monday, Chinese startup DeepSeek’s AI Assistant surpassed ChatGPT to become the top-rated free app on the Apple App Store in the United States.

The app is powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, which its creators claim “tops the leaderboard among open-source models and competes with the most advanced closed-source models globally.” Since its release on January 10, the app has rapidly gained popularity among U.S. users, according to data from app research firm Sensor Tower.

This achievement highlights how DeepSeek is making waves in Silicon Valley, challenging the notion of U.S. dominance in AI and raising questions about the effectiveness of Washington’s export controls aimed at limiting China’s access to advanced chips and AI technology.

AI models like ChatGPT and DeepSeek rely on powerful chips for training. The Biden administration has expanded restrictions since 2021 to prevent the export of these chips to China for use in AI model development. However, DeepSeek’s researchers claimed in a paper last month that the DeepSeek-V3 model was trained using Nvidia’s H800 chips at a cost of under $6 million.

While this claim has been contested, the suggestion that DeepSeek used chips less powerful than the most advanced Nvidia products—those that the U.S. has tried to restrict from reaching China—along with the relatively low cost of training, has led some U.S. tech executives to question the efficacy of the export controls.

DeepSeek, a small startup based in Hangzhou and founded in 2023, is relatively unknown. It emerged shortly after Baidu launched the first Chinese AI language model. While numerous Chinese tech companies have since released their own models, DeepSeek is the first to receive praise from the U.S. tech industry for matching or even surpassing the performance of leading American models.