DeepSeek Chatbot Beats OpenAI on App Store Leaderboard

The Chinese firm said it cost just $5.6 million to train a model that can reason through complex answers and compete with OpenAI’s o1.

Over the weekend, Chinese AI company DeepSeek released an AI chat app including a “reasoning” AI model comparable to OpenAI’s o1, causing a stir among American AI companies as DeepSeek rose to the top of Apple’s App Store.

NVIDIA and Microsoft stock fell on Monday after the buzzy debut. Overall, the stock market reflected a sudden dip in confidence in U.S. AI makers.

For tech professionals, DeepSeek offers another option for writing code or improving efficiency around day-to-day tasks. Along with DeepSeek’s R1 model being able to explain its reasoning, it is based on an open source family of models that can be accessed on GitHub.

DeepSeek’s success has also sparked conversation about whether U.S. restrictions on Chinese ...