Chinese AI assistant DeepSeek has become the top rated free app on Apple's App Store in the US and elsewhere, beating out ChatGPT and other rivals. It's powered by the open-source DeepSeek V3 model, which reportedly requires far less computing power than competitors and was developed for under $6 million,

When Chinese quant hedge fund founder Liang Wenfeng went into AI research, he took 10,000 Nvidia chips and assembled a team of young, ambitious talent. Two years later, DeepSeek exploded on the scene.

The model was developed by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which claims that R1 matches or even surpasses OpenAI’s ChatGPT o1 on multiple key benchmarks but operates at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek’s success is even more remarkable given the constraints facing Chinese AI companies in the form of increasing US export controls on cutting-edge chips.