Sophia Yeskulsky | Head Editor
February 6, 2025
Since its release on Apple’s App Store in mid-January, Deep Seek has taken the world by storm. Developed by the Chinese, DeepSeek is a free AI-powered chatbot that is similar to ChatGPT. On January 27, DeepSeek dethroned ChatGPT and took over rival OpenAI’s coveted spot as the most-downloaded free app in the U.S. on Apple’s App Store.
In recent years, the world has witnessed the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), the technology that enables computers to learn and solve problems making them seem human-like. Trained on massive amounts of data, AI can recognize patterns and produce accurate responses. Since ChatGPT’s release in November of 2022, it has 300 million weekly active users worldwide who use it daily for writing, summarizing text, answering questions, and even coding.
What is so different about DeepSeek?
Chinese billionaire Liang Wenfenga founded DeepSeek in December 2023 with the goal to shock the world and prove that China’s tech industry wasn’t just a bunch of followers. In a rare interview last year, he said that China’s AI sector “cannot remain a follower forever” of US AI development. To outdo ChatGPT, Wenfenga created an AI chatbot that is reportedly as powerful as OpenAI’s o1 model in mathematics and coding. However, what makes it so special is that DeepSeek’s researchers claim to have trained it for only $6 million. Regarding GPT-4, OpenAI’s Sam Altman mentioned that they used over $100 million.
In addition, even though Nvidia A100 chips have been banned from export to China since September 2022, DeepSeek’s founder reportedly built up a store of them. Some experts believe he paired these chips with cheaper, less sophisticated ones, ultimately ending up with a much more efficient process.
Another upside to DeepSeek is that it uses less memory than ChatGPT, which reduces the cost to perform tasks for users. Unlike ChatGPT, DeepSeek is completely free and doesn’t make users pay for better versions. This combination of performance and lower cost is what has helped propel DeepSeek’s AI assistant to become the most-downloaded free app on Apple’s App Store.
Junior Ava Echternach commented, “I used DeepSeek and it was super easy to use and very similar to ChatGPT.” While there hasn’t been a definitive distinction in quality between ChatGPT and DeepSeek, there are potential downsides to DeepSeek. Being that it was founded in China and is a Chinese product, when asked questions on controversial political topics pertaining to Chinese history, the Chatbot declined to answer. Questions like, “What happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989? What are the biggest criticisms of Xi Jinping? How does censorship work in China?” Every time, the response was exactly the same: “Sorry, I’m not sure how to approach this type of question yet. Let’s chat about math, coding, and logic problems instead!” However, when asked, the AI model had no problem giving critiques of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, revealing its selective censorship.
The Chinese artificial intelligence has been criticized. Australia banned it from government devices because of national security risks, while Italy blocked the app because of data privacy concerns. Furthermore, critics like Elon Musk and AI industry experts question DeepSeek’s true hardware resources and transparency. Senior Gianna Melton raised concerns as she felt “that the Chinese government and DeepSeek aren’t telling the truth” as to how much money and resources they used.
While the Communist Party has declined to comment, the rise of DeepSeek has been a huge boost for the Chinese government, which has been seeking to build tech independence from the West for years.
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