A new chatbot from Chinese AI lab DeepSeek sent shockwaves through the market in January, due to its ability to perform mathematics, coding and reasoning at a similar level to ChatGPT and other top-tier chatbots while costing far less and using fewer resources.
The chatbot launched globally on the 20th of January and has quickly drawn in a lot of users, with claims it matches ChatGPT in performance luring a lot of AI testers. The underlying model, which is in its third iteration, has been worked on by DeepSeek since November 2023.
DeepSeek is wholly funded by High-Flyer, a Chinese hedge-fund which utilizes AI for trading algorithms. Its founder, Liang Wenfeng, has made each iteration of DeepSeek open-source and available to view, modify and use for free. This has been instrumental in lowering the cost of AI models in China, with ByteDance, Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba cutting prices to compete.
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Get the ReportWenfang has not committed to any form of commercialization for DeepSeek, which may have kept it from being tied down by the Chinese regulators.
The latest iteration of DeepSeek used about 671 billion parameters and 14.8 trillion tokens, according to its post on transformers library Hugging Face. By comparison, OpenAI’s GPT 4 was reportedly trained on over one trillion parameters with 13 trillion tokens. Not huge differences, but in terms of cost, DeepSeek V3 cost $5.5 million, while GPT 4 cost over $100 million.
Part of this comes down to the smaller team and cost per engineer, but it’s also clear that DeepSeek was able to reach similar performance levels with far less processing power. It has less cloud capacity than OpenAI, and also does not have access to the latest Nvidia GPUs, such as the H100 and H200.
Reaching similar performance has drawn some to speculate that these advanced large language models do not need as much computing power as has been stated, which brings into question the hundreds of billions of dollars major tech companies are allocating to data center development and AI deployment. Nvidia, the biggest supplier of hardware for AI, saw its stock price drop by 18 percent in one day to a four month low.
It has also drawn into question the United States export controls on advanced chips to China, which was brought into law as a way to slow down the development of AI in China and ensure American companies continue to have a lead in AI.
We have collected data and statistics on DeepSeek. Read on below to find out more.
DeepSeek Key Statistics
- DeepSeek third iteration cost $5.5 million to build, 1/18th the cost of OpenAI’s GPT 4
- DeepSeek has been downloaded over 10 million times
- DeepSeek is most popular in China, with 39% of iOS downloads coming from that country
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DeepSeek Overview
| Title 1 | Title 2 |
|---|---|
| Launch date | 1 May 2023 |
| HQ | Hangzhou, China |
| People | Liang Wenfeng (founder, CEO) |
| Business type | Subsidiary |
| Owner | High-Flyer |
| Inudstry | AI |
DeepSeek Users
DeepSeek had an average of 1.8 million daily active users since its launch in the middle of January.
DeepSeek Downloads
DeepSeek has been downloaded over 10 million times in the opening half a month.
DeepSeek downloads 2025 (mm)
| Date | Downloads (mm) |
|---|---|
| January 2025 | 10.7 |
Source: AppMagic
DeepSeek Downloads by Country
Close to 40% of DeepSeek downloads came from China, with the US accounting for 16% of total downloads.
DeepSeek downloads by country 2025 (%)
| Country | Users (%) |
|---|---|
| China | 39% |
| United States | 16% |
| India | 10% |
| South Korea | 7% |
| Russia | 6% |
| France | 4% |
| United Kingdom | 3% |
| Brazil | 3% |
| Germany | 3% |
Source: AppMagic
DeepSeek vs ChatGPT
DeepSeek cost far less to build than GPT 4, even with similar tokens used.
DeepSeek V3 and OpenAI GPT 4 statistics
| DeepSeek V3 | GPT 4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Parameters | 671 billion | 1 trillion |
| Tokens | 14.8 trillion | 13 trillion |
| Cost | $5.5 million | $100 million |
Source: Company data
DeepSeek FAQ
Which country is DeepSeek based in?
DeepSeek is a Chinese based company, with company headquarters in Hangzhou.
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