An AI assistant developed by a largely unknown Chinese company has become the top free app on iPhones.
DeepSeek, created by a Chinese startup, surpassed OpenAI’s ChatGPT to claim the top spot on the Apple App Store in the US.
The app’s AI capabilities have been lauded for being smarter and more efficient than those from well-known US companies like OpenAI. However, its rise has sparked concerns in Silicon Valley, where some fear the popularity and power of the assistant could challenge the dominance of the US AI industry.
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,” the AI app has gained significant traction among U.S. users since its release on January 10, according to app data research firm Sensor Tower.
This milestone underscores how DeepSeek has made an impact on Silicon Valley, challenging long-held beliefs about the US’s AI leadership and the effectiveness of Washington’s export controls on China’s advanced chip and AI technologies.
AI models like ChatGPT and DeepSeek rely on advanced chips for their training. Since 2021, the Biden administration has expanded bans on exporting such chips to China to prevent them from being used in the development of Chinese AI models.
However, DeepSeek researchers noted in a recent paper that the DeepSeek-V3 was trained using Nvidia’s H800 chips, costing under $6 million.
While this detail has been contested, the claim that the chips were less advanced than the top Nvidia products targeted by US export controls, combined with the relatively low training costs, has raised questions among US tech leaders about the effectiveness of these export restrictions.
The company behind DeepSeek is a small startup based in Hangzhou, founded in 2023, the same year search engine giant Baidu launched the first Chinese AI large-language model.
Since then, numerous Chinese tech firms have introduced their own AI models, but DeepSeek is the first to be praised by the US tech industry for potentially matching or even surpassing the performance of top US models.
