Chinese AI app DeepSeek is on top of the App Store, challenging Apple Intelligence, and shaking Wall Street confidence in big tech.

For the second time in the last month, a Chinese app has skyrocketed to the top spot in Apple’s App Store. The first was Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, which saw a sudden surge in downloads by United States users seeking an alternative to TikTok in anticipation of the ban on that app,

Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek has displaced OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the most downloaded app on the Apple App store and the market is panicking. Stocks for major AI connected companies like NVIDIA fell on Monday morning following the news.

The drama started around January 20 when Chinese AI startup DeepSeek announced R1, a new simulated reasoning (SR) model that it claimed could match OpenAI's o1 in reasoning benchmarks. Like o1, R1 is trained to work through a simulated chain of thought process before providing an answer,

Competing with OpenAI’s o1, DeepSeek’s models scored higher on benchmarks and disrupted the AI market, sparking debates on U.S.-China tech dynamics.

A Chinese start-up has stunned the technology industry—and financial markets—with a cheaper, lower-tech AI assistant that matches the state of the art

Unlike some chatbot rivals, the fact that DeepSeek is open source provides it with some level of protection. This means that anyone can run it on their computer and developers can tap into the API in a way that would be hard to restrict. But the DeepSeek app is still at risk.

DeepSeek, a Chinese startup, rocked the AI world after debuting a model that rivaled the capabilities of OpenAI's ChatGPT for a fraction of the price.