DeepSeek climbs to the top of the App Store, beating ChatGPT
Coming seemingly out of nowhere, DeepSeek has already risen to the top of the list of free apps on Apple’s App Store in the US. In a victory that could prove symbolic, it dethroned OpenAI’s ChatGPT app, which previously held the top spot. DeepSeek is not only the US’s top free app, it is the No. 1 free app in 51 countries. Additionally, the app is on the App Store in 111 countries and on the Google Play Store in 18 countries.
DeepSeek is quite new, having only been founded in 2023, and has released several AI models. However, it is the latest model, DeepSeek R1, that has caused the storm – the model reportedly rivals the best that Western companies have developed to date, and yet the Chinese company has spent only a fraction of the resources on training it.
This is currently causing major turmoil in the stock market, as Nvidia has plummeted by about 17%, losing nearly $600 billion in market capitalization, the largest drop ever for a US company. The US export restrictions on AI-focused hardware are circumvented by this discovery. DeepSeek was trained on Nvidia H800 chips, which are a stripped-down version of the H100 and meet China’s export restrictions. Nevertheless, through clever advancements in AI training, the company managed to achieve excellent results despite supposedly inferior hardware.
Things haven’t been smooth sailing for DeepSeek either – the company says it is under attack (digital, a Distributed Denial of Service, aka DDoS) and has restricted new signups for its app to people with a Chinese phone number. Existing users can still use the app, however.
In Cupertino (Apple has yet to successfully introduce Apple Intelligence), in Mountain View (Gemini has been integrated into numerous products by Google) and in Redmond (Microsoft is one of the largest investors in OpenAI) the alarm bells should already be ringing.
