DeepSeek Crossed a Million Downloads and is About to Challenge ChatGPT
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A new Large Language Model from Chinese DeepSeek has made the news last week. The model seems to be matching and even beating established competitors across various benchmarks while being much smaller and is open source.
Quite a bundle! But there's more.
DeepSeek launched a mobile app two weeks ago, and so far, it's a hit.
DeepSeek's mobile release is the second one this month - two more new LLM apps than I expected.
Our estimates show that DeepSeek's free app has already been downloaded more than a million times from the App Store and Google Play. Although more downloads came from the App Store (60%), almost as many came from Google Play indicating there's tremendous hunger for AI.
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For context, Grok, Elon's competitor to ChatGPT, still hasn't gotten to 500K downloads. I know it's only available in a tiny number of countries and only on the App Store, but that's no excuse.
I tried DeepSeek's R1 model, which should be competitive with ChatGPT's o1, and I really like the way it reasons.
Looking at where the downloads are coming from, it's clear the appetite for AI is global. And by clear, I mean that the US isn't the top market in terms of downloads on either platform - and that's not common.
China is the top source of downloads for iPhones, having contributed 35% of the downloads since the app was released. The US came second with a 15% share, or roughly 99K downloads as of Thursday.
I had to check the numbers from Google Play twice because they're very unusual - Algeria brought in the most downloads on Google Play followed by Egypt and only then the US. It's worth noting both Algeria and Egypt were also in the top 10 on the App Store side, which is, again, unusual.
As of Sunday, DeepSeek ranks 2nd on the App Store's Top App's chart in the US, right below ChatGPT and ahead of Gemini (29th) and Microsoft Copilot (344th) while Grok and Claude didn't make the top 500.
DeepSeek is the first open source LLM to launch as a mobile app. Let's see if others, like Meta, will do the same, making it harder for commercial apps to grow.
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