Why China’s DeepSeek could burst our AI bubble [Video]

A new player has made a big entrance in the AI villa, and it’s creating significant disruption. 

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek made waves last week when it released the full version of R1, the company’s open-source reasoning model that can outperform OpenAI’s o1. On Monday, App Store downloads of DeepSeek’s AI assistant topped ChatGPT, which had previously been the most downloaded free app. DeepSeek has also already climbed to the third spot overall on HuggingFace’s Chatbot Arena, under several Gemini models as well as ChatGPT-4o. 

Also: DeepSeek’s new open-source AI model can outperform o1 for a fraction of the cost

But almost as soon as it dethroned OpenAI, DeepSeek began limiting signups due to a cyberattack. ZDNET is currently testing DeepSeek, as we do all other popular AI chatbots, to see how it shapes up, pending signup limitations.  

What is DeepSeek?

Founded by Liang Wenfeng in May 2023 (and …