DeepSeek Is Kicking ChatGPT’s Ass in the iOS App Store

Marc Andreessen, a veteran venture capitalist of Silicon Valley, called it a “Sputnik moment.” Not sure what that means? Nobody in 1957 thought the Soviet Union’s space program was advanced enough to pose a threat to that of the US.

The sudden appearance of Sputnik 1 slingshotting around the Earth caused more hand-wringing in the West than rock n’ roll and Marilyn Manson’s skirt put together. In the span of a day, the West had to suddenly confront the idea that they’d fallen behind their chief rivals.

And so here we are again. DeepSeek, a Chinese generative AI, overtook OpenAI’s ChatGPT on the Apple App Store with such suddenness early this morning that you’d think the sky was falling, just over Silicon Valley, specifically.

out of east left field

There’s been a sense of complacency and superiority in the West that its lead over the rest of the world’s AI research was comfortable, to say the least. That China could create such an advanced AI model in DeepSeek that it not only competes with the West’s best—ChatGPT—but compares favorably with it has profoundly rattled the industry’s analysts and the stock market.

China was supposed to be banned from receiving the most advanced chips that folks thought were required to make top-notch generative AI models, such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Anthropic’s Claude.

Now industry analysts are left taking guesses at how DeepSeek was able to build such a competent AI with the cheaper, lower-end chips that Chinese companies are still allowed to import.

DeepSeek released a document that says the total investment into developing its DeepSeek-V3 model is $5.576 million USD. That’s million, with an “m.”

Meanwhile, OpenAI has been pouring billions of dollars of investment that it believes it needs to refine and evolve ChatGPT.

The bottom of Microsoft and Nvidia NASDAQ stock fell out in the wake of the news Monday morning. The former is OpenAI’s largest investor, and its stocks dropped 6 percent. The latter has been trading first and second place with Apple for the title of the world’s most valuable company, largely because the world is gobbling up Nvidia chipsets to run advanced AIs, and its stock fell 10 percent.

Meanwhile, the US government has been fretting over people posting dance videos and buying crap on TikTok all the while DeepSeek was in the oven, baking. So what are you waiting for, comrade? Download it here on the App Store for iOS and the Google Play Store for Android.