DeepSeek AI Assistant from China has become the best free app on iPhone

Chinese AI assistant DeepSeek has become it Top rated free app on the Apple App Store in the US and elsewhere, beating ChatGPT and other competitors. It’s powered by the open source DeepSeek V3 model, which is said to require far less computing power than competitors and was developed for less than $6 million, according to (Disputed) Claims by the company. At the same time, it delivers performance On par with Cloud-3.5, GPT-4o and other competitors, DeepSeek said last week.

Available on web, apps, and API, DeepSeek is similar to an AI assistant like ChatGPT with features like coding content generation and search. The first version of 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 reportedly stockpiled NVIDIA A100 chips before releasing them Export ban to the United States And pair them with less powerful chips that can still be imported, according to MIT Technology Review.

However, DeepSeek still had significant hardware shortcomings compared to competing models from OpenAI, Google, and others. This forced the company to be more efficient with its AI models, and it was supposedly able to build and train them at a much lower cost than previously thought.

Analysts from City and elsewhere have done so He disputed those claimsHowever, he noted that China represents a “more restrictive environment” for AI development than the United States. However, the rise of DeepSeek has raised concerns about the potential profits of competitors like OpenAI that have already invested billions in AI infrastructure. In fact, news that DeepSeek topped the App Store charts caused tech stocks like NVIDIA and ASML to fall sharply this morning.

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