The DeepSeek app, which was launched last week by a Chinese startup, has overtaken rivals including ChatGPT to become the most downloaded free app in the United States.
It is powered by the open-source DeepSeek-V3 model, which its researchers claim was developed for less than $6M—significantly less than the billions spent by rivals, BBC reports.
According to Reuters, the launch offers the prospect of a viable, cheaper AI alternative, raising questions on the heavy spending by U.S. companies such as Apple and Microsoft, amid growing investor push for returns.
“Our goal is to explore the potential of LLMs to develop reasoning capabilities without any supervised data, focusing on their self-evolution through a pure RL process,” said the team behind DeepSeek.
DeepSeek-R1-Zero is built on a pure reinforcement learning (RL) framework, which allows it to develop reasoning capabilities autonomously. Initial evaluations show that it achieved a pass rate of 71% on the AIME 2024 benchmark, an increase from 15.6%. However, the model faced challenges such as poor readability and language mixing.
To address these issues, DeepSeek introduced DeepSeek-R1, which incorporated a multi-stage training approach and cold-start data. This method improved the model’s performance by refining its reasoning abilities while maintaining clarity in output.
The emerging AI chatbot sent stocks tumbling, affecting NVIDIA, Oracle, Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet.
Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen described DeepSeek-R1 as "AI's Sputnik moment", a reference to the satellite launched by the Soviet Union in 1957.