Despite being in development for a few years, DeepSeek seems to have arrived almost overnight after the release of its R1 model on Jan 20 took the AI world by storm, mainly because it offers performance that competes with ChatGPT-o1 without charging you to use it. Its app is currently number one on the iPhone's App Store as a result of its instant popularity.
DeepSeek is a Chinese-owned AI startup and has developed its latest LLMs (called DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1) to be on a par with rivals ChatGPT-4o and ChatGPT-o1 while costing a fraction of the price for its API connections. And because of the way it works, DeepSeek uses far less computing power to process queries.
