The DeepSeek application surprised the world by topping the list of free applications on the Apple App Store in the United States, surpassing the ChatGPT application from OpenAI, which previously held the first place. And it was not limited to the United States only, as DeepSeek topped the list of free applications in 51 countries, and ranked tenth in the list of free applications in 111 countries on the App Store and in 18 countries on the Google Play Store.
Deep Seek is a Chinese startup company founded in 2023, and has launched several models of artificial intelligence, but the latest model, Deep Seek R1, has spread widely and unexpectedly in competition with all the giants in the field. It is noteworthy that this model competes with the best that American companies have achieved in this field, despite the company using only a small portion of the resources needed to train it.
Deep Seek sudden impact on the world’s market
The achievement sent the stock market into a tailspin, with Nvidia shares falling 17%, wiping $600 billion off its market value, the biggest one-day drop in US corporate history
This is a major blow to US efforts to restrict the export of AI hardware to China in particular. DeepSeek was trained using Nvidia’s H800 chips, a simplified version of the H100 chips that are subject to export restrictions to China, but the company has been able to achieve excellent results using these less powerful chips thanks to its impressive progress in AI training.
DeepSeek’s path has not been without its hurdles, with the company announcing that it had been hit by a DDoS attack and introducing restrictions on app registration, making it only available to people with a Chinese phone number. However, existing users can continue to use the app.
This achievement has undoubtedly raised great concerns among US tech giants, such as Apple, which has not yet fully launched its own AI operating system (Apple Intelligence), Google, which has integrated Gemini technology into many of its products, and Microsoft, which is a major supporter of AI and a major investor in OpenAI.
