The Deeper End of DeepSeek

For years, OpenAI reigned supreme, fending off challengers from Google, Anthropic, and xAI. But nothing—not even the rise of ChatGPT—prepared the AI world for DeepSeek R1.

In just days, this Chinese-built AI model has upended the industry, outperforming OpenAI’s o1, dethroning ChatGPT in the App Store, and sending NVIDIA’s market cap tumbling by $589 billion. And here’s the kicker: it did all of this on a fraction of the resources.

Unlike OpenAI’s closed ecosystem, DeepSeek-R1 is open-source, free to use, and radically efficient. It achieves state-of-the-art performance without requiring massive GPU clusters, forcing the industry to rethink the high-cost arms race in AI.