BEIJING (Reuters) – Chinese startup DeepSeek’s AI assistant surpassed rival Chatgpt on Monday to become the top free application available on Apple Inc’s App Store in the United States.
Powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, which its creators say “has topped charts between open source models and the most advanced closed source models worldwide”, the artificial intelligence application has been on the rise since its release on a US user (Jan Jan) Popularity among US users. 10. Research company sensor towers based on applied data.
The milestone underscores DeepSeek’s deep impression of Silicon Valley, a broader view of U.S. primacy in artificial intelligence and the effectiveness of Washington’s export controls against China’s advanced chip and artificial intelligence capabilities.
AI models from Chatgpt to DeepSeek require advanced chips to power their training. Since 2021, the Biden Administration has expanded the scope of the ban, aiming to prevent these chips from being exported to China and used to train AI models for Chinese companies.
However, DeepSeek-V3 used NVIDIA’s H800 chip to train and cost less than $6 million, DeepSeek researchers wrote in a paper last month.
While this detail has been controversial, claims that the chips used are less powerful than the most advanced NVIDIA products, which Washington is trying to distance from China, and the relatively cheap training costs, have prompted U.S. technology executives 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 released the first large-scale Chinese AI language model.
Since then, dozens of big tech companies have released their own AI models, but DeepSeek was the first to be praised by the U.S. tech industry for matching or even exceeding the performance of the most advanced American models.
(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista. Editing by GerryDoyle)
