A newcomer has thrown a wrench into the generative AI pond: DeepSeek. A Chinese tool that does better than ChatGPT and others for less money. To the point of panicking the tech world and even the stock markets!
The emergence of generative AI has brought with it a host of tools that have become real references in their fields, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney, DALL-E and Gemini. Powerful and popular tools, designed and supported by start-ups and major tech players, mainly American (Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Apple, etc.), which could suggest that the game is already up and running. that no serious competitor will be able to emerge – evidenced by the premature and failed launch of French AI Lucy.
But it also happens that small nuggets, like DeepSeek, shake up the existing chessboard and thus create a new rivalry between AIs, developers, and even countries. DeepSeek is a Chinese company founded in 2023 which aims to enable China to find its place in the digital future. It is also an open source service which offers generative AI capable today of competing with ChatGPT or even Claude.
DeepSeek: cheaper and better than ChatGPT
Behind these promises, DeepSeek actually manages to surpass the Open AI tool. Its language model (the millions of pieces of computer data that allow the machine to understand human language) is simply considered one of the greatest ever designed for an AI. Equipped with nearly 671 billion parameters (the “neurons” of AI, to take a simplistic picture), this model far exceeds the 175 billion parameters of GPT-3. Knowing that with each DeepSeek interaction activates 37 billion. This allows the Chinese AI to consume very few resources and support around 128,000 tokens (this is the capacity to process a unit of text more or less easily and quickly), compared to 200,000 for the Open AI chatbot. .
Additionally, according to initial tests, DeepSeek is also faster than ChatGPT, especially in the areas of coding and mathematics. Finally, and this is its main advantage, it is much cheaper. According to estimates, its development cost nearly $5.6 million, compared to $100 million for GPT-4 (the latest version of Open AI’s chat bot). Thus, DeepSeek-V3 can, like its rivals (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc.), converse with a human by answering questions, analyze documents and generate text in different styles. The company DeepSeek also offers other tools such as DeepSeek-R1, a “reasoning model” comparable to ChatGPT-o1, widely used in coding and programming. Chinese AI can self-interrogate, simulate thinking and even solve a complex math problem, all for a price 27 times cheaper than its American counterpart.
DeepSeek: China ahead of the United States?
Beyond the technical characteristics and the price of the tool, DeepSeek has recently gained one more advantage over ChatGPT. AI has become the first application on the App Store in the United States ahead of its rival. Will this be enough to dethrone the Open AI juggernaut? Nothing is less certain. For now, DeepSeek has already achieved a great feat by overtaking ChatGPT and offering a tool of similar or even higher quality, at a more advantageous price.
On the economic side, the arrival of Chinese AI has somewhat shaken up the global financial market. Monday January 27, the Nasdaq 100 (i.e. the 100 largest non-financial companies listed on the American stock exchange) fell by 2.8%. In France, the companies Schneider Electric and Legrand fell by 7.5% and 6.5% respectively on the CAC 40. But the biggest fall on the stock market of the day was that of Nvidia. The American company specializing in the design of graphics circuits and chips for AI lost 13% of its value, to the point of being demoted to third place in the world’s largest capitalizations, reports BFM Bourse. Suffice it to say that the world of international engagement is wondering about the future with the arrival of this very promising Chinese newcomer.
DeepSeek has made a sensational entry into the digital and artificial intelligence market in the space of a few weeks. In the future, Chinese AI could surpass its American counterparts from OpenAI and Google thanks to its performance, its price, but also its open source language model – that is, accessible to all users. So, if you want to test one of the DeepSeek models – the DeepSeek-V3 chatbot or the DeepSeek-R1 coding tool, you can go to the website chat.deepseek.com or download the application on iOS or Android. In addition, the model is also accessible from the Perplexity AI.