DeepSeek's new AI assistant app is the top free app on the Apple App Store, ahead of ChatGPT

Chinese AI company DeepSeek has had some rather large success on the Apple App Store, with its AI assistant now the top free app on the App Store, beating out ChatGPT.

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In particular AI benchmarks, DeepSeek's R1 model matches or even beats OpenAI's new o1 model, and better yet... DeepSeek has said its R1 model cost just $5.6 million to train. This is compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars that other companies spend training their AI models.

This is all with US sanctions restricting high-powered AI chips from hitting Chinese shores, leaving DeepSeek to play it differently when it came to powering its AI training on the cheap. DeepSeek is using NVIDIA H100 AI GPUs for some of its training, with DeepSeek founder and CEO Liang Wenfeng has recently said that US export restrictions are still bottlenecking the company.

Curai CEO Neal Khosla has had some harsh comments, posting on X that "deepseek is a CCP state psyop + economic warfare to make American AI unprofitable. they are faking the cost was low to justify setting price low and hoping everyone switches to it damage AI competitiveness in the US. Don't take the bait".

However, Khosla's father is an OpenAI investor thanks to X's awesome Community Notes feature.

DeepSeek's new R1 model has 671 billion parameters is rather large, with smaller "distilled" versions of R1 models ranging from 1.5 billion parameters to 70 billion parameters. DeepSeek's smallest R1 model can run on a laptop, but for the full-force R1 model it requires much more hardware... but, it's available through DeepSeek's API at prices that are a game-changing 90-95% cheaper than OpenAI's o1 model.