A Chinese-made artificial intelligence (AI) model called DeepSeek has shot to the top of Apple Store's downloads, stunning investors and sinking some tech stocks. It was released on 20 January, quickly impressing AI geeks before it got the attention of the entire tech industry - and the world.


What is DeepSeek?

DeepSeek is the name of a free AI-powered chatbot, which looks, feels and works very much like ChatGPT.

That means it's used for many of the same tasks, though exactly how well it works compared to its rivals is up for debate.

But the AI model that powers it - called R1 - has some 670 billion parameters, making it the largest open-source large language model yet, according to Anil Ananthaswamy, author of Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI.

DeepSeek was founded in December 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, and released its first AI large language model the following year.

DeepSeek-R1 is now live and open source, rivaling OpenAI's Model o1. Available on web, app, and API.