How impressive is DeepSeek? Within just 30 days of its launch, it skyrocketed to 300 million downloads worldwide, leaving ChatGPT in the dust. It topped the charts in Apple’s App Store across 197 countries and Google’s Play Store in the U.S., dominating the rankings like never before.
DeepSeek functionality is nothing short of extraordinary, with applications spanning a wide range of fields. Students use it to solve math problems in seconds; developers leverage it to write code and debug with doubled efficiency; content creators rely on it to craft viral articles effortlessly; travelers plan their itineraries with precision; and businesses deploy it as an intelligent customer service agent, delivering fast and accurate responses.
This large language model from China is openly challenging ChatGPT, claiming that it can match or even surpass it in terms of speed, accuracy of responses, and especially its open-source nature. DeepSeek isn’t just a viral sensation—it’s a seismic shift in the AI industry, surpassing ChatGPT in 11 key areas.
1. Rational Thinking: Thinking Like a Human
The most unique charm of DeepSeek lies in its human-like thinking logic. While ChatGPT often just provides a dry final answer to users’ questions, DeepSeek is completely different. It breaks down its thought process step by step, like a patient tutor guiding you from the question to the answer. This highly human-like reasoning process ensures that DeepSeek’s responses always perfectly align with human thinking habits, making them easy to understand and convincing to the reader.
2. Knowledge Distillation and Model Compression
DeepSeek employs knowledge distillation techniques to compress the capabilities of large-scale models into smaller, more efficient ones. This allows DeepSeek to remain competitive even on hardware with limited resources. Some of its models have as few as 1.5 billion parameters yet can still perform complex tasks, making it a cost-effective and accessible solution.
3. Reinforcement Learning and Reward Engineering
DeepSeek extensively uses reinforcement learning during model training, optimizing decision-making through trial-and-error mechanisms and environmental feedback. Additionally, it has developed a rule-based reward system to guide the learning process, significantly improving training efficiency and logical reasoning capabilities.
4. Novel Attention Mechanism
DeepSeek introduces MLA (Multi-head Latent Attention), a groundbreaking attention mechanism that drastically reduces computational load and memory usage during inference. What sets DeepSeek apart is its ability to act as a “thought microscope.” Unlike other AI models that simply provide answers, DeepSeek lays bare its entire reasoning process: how it constructs an analytical framework, performs layered reasoning, and arrives at conclusions. It’s like having a personal thinking coach, helping users reshape their cognitive operating systems.
5. Usage Costs
From a cost perspective, DeepSeek is essentially free for the average user at the moment. In contrast, ChatGPT’s premium model charges a subscription fee of $20 per month, which is not exactly cheap. Compared to that, DeepSeek’s free approach is incredibly appealing.
6. API Pricing
DeepSeek’s API pricing is highly competitive, charging $0.14 per million input tokens (cache hit) or $0.55 (cache miss), and $2.24 per million output tokens. This pricing is approximately one-thirtieth of OpenAI’s operational costs, making it a far more economical choice for businesses and developers.
7. Training Costs
The pre-training cost for DeepSeek’s R1 model is a mere $5.576 million, less than one-tenth of OpenAI’s GPT-4 training expenses. This cost efficiency makes DeepSeek a more accessible option for organizations with limited budgets.
8. Full Open-Source Availability
DeepSeek’s R1 model has become the most downloaded large model on Hugging Face, with 109,000 downloads. This open-source approach allows developers worldwide to study and adapt the model for their own AI projects. In contrast, ChatGPT’s code and model remain closed-source, limiting its accessibility and adaptability.
9. Superior Math Reasoning and Code Generation
DeepSeek achieves a 77.5% accuracy rate on the MATH benchmark, rivaling OpenAI’s o1 model. In programming, it scores 2441 on Codeforces, outperforming 96.3% of human participants. These results demonstrate DeepSeek’s superior capabilities in specialized fields like math reasoning and code generation.
10. Localization Excellence
DeepSeek is tailored to the Chinese internet ecosystem, featuring a dynamically updated sensitive word database and dialect recognition module. In government service scenarios, its policy terminology accuracy reaches 98.6%, a 21% improvement over GPT-4’s Chinese version. Additionally, DeepSeek outperforms GPT-4 in classical Chinese poetry generation tasks.
11. Breaking Dependency on High-End Hardware
DeepSeek’s efficiency has disrupted the reliance on ultra-high-end hardware, thwarting attempts by foreign manufacturers to monopolize the market. For instance, NVIDIA’s stock price plummeted by 17% overnight, wiping out trillions in market value and reshaping global competition. This shift has forced companies to rethink their strategies and could herald a new era for mid-to-low-end chips. If not for market manipulation, China’s A-share market would have seen a surge in semiconductor and AI-related stocks post-Lunar New Year.
DeepSeek’s Impact on Industries and Opportunities
In summary, DeepSeek’s emergence is a boon for numerous industries, driving upgrades in education, training, office work, commerce, and more. While some repetitive jobs may disappear, new roles like AI experts and AI trainers are emerging. For the average person, this represents a wealth of opportunities. DeepSeek isn’t just a tool—it’s a catalyst for transformation, reshaping industries and creating new possibilities for everyone.