It’s not just DeepSeek: 8 of China’s top AI chatbots

The DeepSeek AI chatbot was developed by a Chinese AI startup also called DeepSeek. The startup was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, co-founder of the Chinese quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer Capital Management.

After DeepSeek demonstrated that its V3 AI models and R1 reasoning models could perform on par with models from OpenAI, the AI chatbot surged to the top of Apple’s (AAPL) App Store downloads. The DeepSeek site, meanwhile, experienced outages from an influx of new users. The startup had to put a temporary limit on registrations after “large-scale malicious attacks.” DeepSeek was powered by V3, which the startup said was competitive with Meta’s (META) Llama 3.1 and OpenAI’s 4o models.

Unlike some of its competitors, DeepSeek explains its “reasoning” before responding to inquiries. However, it does not directly answer prompts about politically sensitive topics in China, such as President Xi Jinping or Taiwan.