DeepSeek dominates app charts, reaching #1 on both US Play Store and App Store

Chinese AI assistant DeepSeek’s Android app has soared to the top of the Google Play Store, just days after its chatbot app clinched the coveted number one spot on the Apple App Store. This swift rise marks a significant milestone for DeepSeek, a company making waves in the AI industry with its innovative and cost-effective AI models.

Since launching in mid-January, DeepSeek’s app has amassed impressive numbers, with over 1.2 million downloads on the Play Store and more than 1.9 million on the App Store worldwide, according to AppFigures. These numbers are likely even higher, as the Play Store label for the app indicates it has surpassed 5 million downloads. The company’s rapid success follows the release of a series of open-source AI models that have gained significant traction in comparison to industry giants like OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, and Google.

DeepSeek’s technology, powered by the company’s V3 AI model, is positioned as a strong alternative to popular chatbots such as ChatGPT. Despite operating on significantly less expensive AI infrastructure, DeepSeek claims its models were developed at a fraction of the cost compared to its Western counterparts. The app allows users to interact with the AI to analyze files, answer queries, and retrieve information from the web. It also offers a free platform with the ability to upload files and sync chat history across devices, features that make it a compelling choice for many.

OpenAI has recently indicated it has discovered evidence suggesting that the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek may have used OpenAI’s proprietary models to train its own open-source competitor, raising concerns about a potential intellectual property violation.

The San Francisco-based company behind ChatGPT told the Financial Times that it had identified signs of “distillation,” a process it believes could be linked to DeepSeek’s use of OpenAI’s models.