DeepSeek R1, a generative AI chatbot released by Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek, has been causing waves across the industry ever since it has been made public in January 2025. Not only has it become the most downloaded app on App Store, but it has also challenged the domination of giants like OpenAI and NVIDIA. Post DeepSeek R1’s release, Nvidia’s shares dropped as much as 13% soon on Monday post the opening bell, and has erased about $585 billion from the company’s market capitalization. NVIDIA’s share prices have dropped by 18% so far.
DeepSeek offers all the features and functionalities of ChatGPT but at much lower costs and uses much less resources. Also, DeepSeek has decided to make its generative AI chatbot open source, allowing its code to be freely accessed, modified, and used by others. This includes granting permission to utilize the source code and design documents for development purposes.
The hype around the GenAI offering has even managed to evoke a response from OpenAI founder Sam Altman. “DeepSeek’s R1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they’re able to deliver for the price. We will obviously deliver much better models and also it’s legit invigorating to have a new competitor! we will pull up some releases. But mostly we are excited to continue to execute on our research roadmap and believe more compute is more important now than ever before to succeed at our mission. The world is going to want to use a LOT of ai, and really be quite amazed by the next gen models coming,” said Altman while hinting at bringing in artificial general intelligence into the market soon.
DeepSeek is currently seeking out talented young AI researchers from leading universities in China and also brings in professionals from non-computer science backgrounds to broaden the knowledge and capabilities of its models.
Features of the DeepSeek App
The DeepSeek app includes several practical features designed for ease of use and functionality:
- Users can log in securely using their email, Google account, or Apple ID.
- It supports cross-platform chat history synchronization, allowing conversations to be accessed across devices.
- The app also offers tools like web search and a Deep-Think mode for detailed queries and analysis.
- Additionally, it enables file uploads with text extraction capabilities, making it useful for handling and processing documents efficiently.
Why DeepSeek R1 Has Become a Hit Amongst Users
The following are some of the reasons why the latest generative AI chatbot is making headlines:
- The model is a lot more cheaper than other generative AI solutions in the market.
- OpenAI relies mostly on NVDIA for GPUS and uses for 30,000 GPUs. However, DeepSeek on the other hand uses only 2000 GPUs for high performance.
- It challenges the norm that AI models need expensive hardware and large computational resources to work efficiently.
- It’s open source and has managed to challenge dominant giants in the space, thus suggesting that open source is the game changer and may be the way forward.