BENGALURU: DeepSeek’s dramatic impact on tech stocks worldwide on Monday was likely also the result of the huge interest it has generated among consumers. The Chinese artificial intelligence app has soared to the No. 1 spot in Apple’s App Store productivity category across major markets including the US, UK, China and India, overtaking ChatGPT and other rivals in the generative AI space.
In Google Play in India, DeepSeek was only at No. 26 and ChatGPT at No. 4 in the productivity category, but this could change in the coming days with the attention it is receiving.
Among DeepSeek’s rivals building large language models (LLMs), Perplexity founder & CEO Aravind Srinivas was the only one to make a public comment on the Chinese company’s accomplishment. He congratulated DeepSeek, and noted on X: “For a while, it wasn’t clear who would beat ChatGPT for the first time. The best we (Perplexity) could manage was #8, a year ago. Look forward to using all their (DeepSeek’s) models for search, assistant, and agents this year.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made an indirect reference to it. Speaking at the World Economic Forum, he said, “We should take the developments out of China very, very seriously.”
DeepSeek is founded by Liang Wenfeng, who previously founded a hedge fund. What makes its achievement noteworthy has been its ability to make a ChatGPT-class language model at a fraction of ChatGPT’s cost. DeepSeek’s R1 AI model is said to match or even beat the likes of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini on multiple parameters. What’s more, it’s free, unlike ChatGPT that has a very limited free version.
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the marquee venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and an advisor to US President Donald Trump, described DeepSeek’s accomplishment as “AI’s Sputnik moment,” making a reference to a period of anxiety among Western nations about a possible technological gap between the US and the Soviet Union when the latter launched the Sputnik satellite. Social media platform X was abuzz with DeepSeek around this. While some took potshots at companies such as OpenAI, which was founded 10 years ago, raised about $17.9 billion in funding, and has an employee base of thousands, others cast doubts on DeepSeek’s claims of spending less than $6 million to build R1.
US venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya said: “We need to get better at taking huge shots on goal and allocating capital to the best of these ideas. I worry that in this current melee, we’ve overspent billions on dumb features which these next-gen models will roll over in the next 12 months or earlier. Lots of capital losses are coming.” Garry Tan, CEO of famed Silicon Valley-based startup accelerator Y Combinator, said DeepSeek’s search feels more sticky even after a few queries “because seeing the reasoning, even how earnest it is about what it knows and what it might not know, increases user trust by quite a lot.”
Vaibhav Domkundwar, founder & CEO of Better Capital, told TOI that R1 is significant because it changes the game entirely. “It is not about proving what its real cost is… we will know a lot more in the coming days, but it will disprove a lot of the narrative pushed by OpenAI and others,” he said.
