Chinese startup DeepSeek’s AI assistant overtook rival ChatGPT on Monday to become the highest-rated free app in Apple’s U.S. App Store.
Powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, which its creators say “leads among open-source models and rivals the most advanced closed-source models globally,” the artificial intelligence application has gained popularity among of U.S. users since its release on Jan. 10, according to app data research firm Sensor Tower.
This milestone shows how DeepSeek has left a strong impression in Silicon Valley, upending widely held views about U.S. primacy in artificial intelligence and the effectiveness of export controls in place by Washington to combat China’s capabilities in chips and artificial intelligence.
AI models, from ChatGPT to DeepSeek, need advanced chips for training. Since 2021, the Biden administration has expanded the scope of bans aimed at preventing the export of these chips to China and their use to train Chinese companies’ AI models.
However, DeepSeek researchers wrote in a paper published last month that DeepSeek-V3 used Nvidia’s H800 chips for training, spending less than $6 million.
-Although this detail has since been disputed, the claim that the chips used were less powerful than the most advanced Nvidia products that Washington has worked to prevent from entering China, as well as the relatively low training costs high, have prompted U.S. technology officials to question the effectiveness of technology export controls.
Little is known about the company behind DeepSeek, a small Hangzhou-based startup founded in 2023, when search engine giant Baidu brought China’s first foreign-language AI model to market .
Since then, dozens of Chinese tech companies large and small have released their own AI models, but DeepSeek is the first to be hailed by the U.S. tech industry as matching or even surpassing the performance of U.S. AI models. point.
