DeepSeek climbs to top spot of the App Store, beats ChatGPT in the process
Coming seemingly out of nowhere, DeepSeek has already climbed to the top of the free apps list on the Apple App Store in the US. In a victory that could prove symbolic, it dethroned OpenAIâs ChatGPT app that previously held the top spot.
Itâs not just the US either, DeepSeek is the #1 free app in 51 countries. Further, the app is in the Top 10 free apps lists in 111 countries on the App Store and in 18 countries on the Google Play Store.
DeepSeek is quite new, only founded in 2023, and it released several AI models. However, it is the latest model, DeepSeek R1, which caused the storm â the model reportedly rivals the best that Western companies have come up with so far and yet the Chinese company used only a fraction of the resources to train it.
This is causing huge upsets in the stock market right now with Nvidia falling some 17% â losing nearly $600 billion in market capitalization, which is the biggest ever drop for a US company.
This throws a wrench in the USâ attempts to restrict the export of AI-focused hardware â DeepSeek was trained on Nvidia H800 chips, which is a pared-down version of the H100 that meets the export restrictions for China, but with clever advancements in AI training, the company managed to get excellent results with supposedly worse hardware.
It hasnât been smooth sailing for DeepSeek either â the company claims that it is under attack (digitally, a distributed denial of service, aka DDoS) and has restricted new sign-ups for its app to people with a Chinese phone number. Existing users can continue using the app, however.
Still, this must have alarm bells ringing over in Cupertino (Apple is yet to properly roll out Apple Intelligence), Mountain View (Google has pushed Gemini into a lot of its products) and Redmond (Microsoft is a strong proponent for AI and a big investor in OpenAI).