
What is DeepSeek? Chinese AI startup dethrones ChatGPT on App Store
By Simone Del Rosario (Business correspondent), Brent Jabbour (Senior Producer), Emma Stoltzfus (Video Editor)
Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek’s AI Assistant dethroned ChatGPT to take the No. 1 spot on Apple App Store’s free app chart. The AI disruptor also rocked the stock market Monday, Jan. 27, while facing “large-scale malicious attacks” that forced it to limit users.
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DeepSeek’s rise sunk Nvidia and other tech companies’ stock prices. Nvidia’s share price fell nearly 17% on Monday while the tech-heavy NASDAQ dropped 3%.

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“I’m going by the papers they’re publishing, and it’s very impressive,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “So I think we should take the development out of China very, very seriously.”
What is DeepSeek?
Hedge fund manager Liang Wenfeng founded DeepSeek in 2023. The nascent AI lab gained a ton of attention this month after releasing its R1 model to rival OpenAI’s GPT o1 model. It’s already nearly as good as OpenAI, according to the Artificial Analysis Quality Index.
“What we found is that Deep Seek, which is the leading Chinese AI lab, their model is actually the top performing, or roughly on par with the best American model,” Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang told CNBC last week.
DeepSeek’s R1 is open-source, meaning any AI developer can use it, modify it and enhance it. The company said it can learn and improve without human involvement. Users say it excels at chain-of-thought reasoning, a process involving breaking down a complicated task into logical steps.
Why did tech stocks dive?
U.S. tech companies have been pouring billions of dollars into AI development, but DeepSeek is reportedly breaking the internet on a budget.