Artificial Intelligence has become integral to our lives, so much so that large language models like ChatGPT and DeepSeek are shooting for the top rankings at Google Play and Apple App Store. ChatGPT didn’t have much competition so far, but a Chinese company DeepSeek AI seemingly came out of nowhere and snatched the top spot in the US.
We hear DeepSeek is the number one free downloadable AI app in over 51 countries, not just the US. It is even present among the top 10 list on the Google Play Store across 18 countries, and it is plain dominating the grounds at Apple App Store in over 111 countries.
DeepSeek is about a two-year-old company, but until now, it wasn’t recognized by the general AI user base. This is only happening now because of DeepSeek’s new R1 model, which experts say is the competitor of OpenAI’s most premium and expensive “o1” model. ChatGPT is free in itself, but the o1 model is part of its Pro subscription that costs around $200 a month.
So, imagine coming across an AI app that is just as powerful, if not more, and doesn’t cost a penny. DeepSeek R1 is free to use, and it’s so well-liked by iPhone users that it quickly outranked the top-dog LLM ChatGPT as the most downloaded app on the Apple App Store.
DeepSeek jumped to the top so quickly that it shook the graphs in the stock market right now. Nvidia fell around 17% in value, as it lost over $600 billion in market capitalization. This is a historical drop for this company and shows the losing interest among investors.
The US has incontrovertibly attempted to restrict China’s access to commercial AI-powering hardware, but that couldn’t stop the market’s advent in large language training. From what we’ve been hearing, DeepSeek was trained on Nvidia’s H800 chips instead of the faster and latest H100 due to import restrictions, and it still managed to beat OpenAI.
DeepSeek only used a fraction of what OpenAI used to train its large language model ChatGPT. It is possible that after Nvidia and OpenAI, DeepSeek will come after Apple Intelligence, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot, and we can’t wait to see where this competition leads.
