DeepSeek’s AI Assistant from China has become the first free iPhone app

The Chinese AI assistant DeepSeek has become top rated free app on Apple’s App Store in the US and elsewhere, beating out ChatGPT and other rivals. It is powered by the open-source model DeepSeek V3, which is said to require much less computing power than competitors and was developed for less than $6 million, according to (disputed) claims from the company. At the same time, it offers performance that is on par with Claude-3.5, GPT-4o and other rivals, DeepSeek reported last week.

Available on the web, app and API, DeepSeek is similar to AI Assistant like ChatGPT with features like coding content creation and search. Its first version DeepSeek-R1 is available under an MIT license, so it can be used commercially and without restrictions.

The company is headquartered in Hangzhou, China and was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, who also launched the hedge fund that backs DeepSeek. To develop the technology, he said that he stored NVIDIA A100 chips before US export and pair those with less powerful chips that can also be imported, depending MIT Technology Review.

However, DeepSeek was still at a significant hardware disadvantage next to rival models from OpenAI, Google and others. That has forced the company to be more efficient with its AI models, and it is supposed that it has been able to build and train at a much lower cost than was thought possible.

Analysts at Citi and elsewhere have he questioned these claimshowever, and said China is a “more restrictive environment” for AI development than the United States. However, DeepSeek’s rise has raised concerns about the potential profits of rivals like OpenAI that have already invested billions in AI infrastructure. In fact, the news that DeepSeek topped the App Store charts caused a sharp drop in technology stocks like NVIDIA and ASML this morning.

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