DeepSeek reaches No. 1 on US Play Store

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek‘s Android app has taken the No. 1 spot on the Google Play Store, mere days after the company’s chatbot app clinched the top spot on the Apple App Store.

According to app analytics firm AppFigures, since its launch in mid-January, the DeepSeek app has been downloaded over 1.2 million times on the Play Store and over 1.9 million times on the App Store across the world. Notably, the actual number of installs could be higher as DeepSeek has a label indicating over 5 million downloads on the Play Store.

The rapid rise of DeepSeek in the charts follows a sudden rise in popularity resulting from the release of a series of open-source AI models that are competitive with leading offerings by AI companies in the West, like Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Google.

However, the Chinese company claims its AI models were trained for just a fraction of the price as the ones from the likes of OpenAI and Meta, and using significantly worse AI chips.

DeepSeek’s app is essentially a ChatGPT alternative that’s powered by the Chinese lab’s V3 model. You can use the bot to analyze files, answer questions, and get information from the web. The app is free and lets you upload files and sync your chat history across devices

While DeepSeek is ruling the charts for now, it will have to get to 300 million weekly users to overtake OpenAI’s ChatGPT for a long-term lead in chatbots.

Both DeepSeek and its family of models have received a lot of attention from the industry in the past few days. Startups like Perplexity and Gloo — former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger’s new venture — are already integrating DeepSeek for their usage.