What is DeepSeek: China’s AI has got people talking

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What is DeepSeek: China’s AI has got people talking

DeepSeek has become one of the world’s best known chatbots and much of that is due to it being developed in China – a country that wasn’t, until now, considered to be at the forefront of AI technology.

Having produced a model that is on a par, in terms of performance, with OpenAI’s acclaimed o1 model, it quickly caught the imagination of users who helped it to shoot to the top of the iOS App Store chart.

But while it’s more than capable of answering questions and generating code, with OpenAI’s Sam Altman going as far as calling the AI model “impressive”, AI’s apparent ‘Sputnik moment’ isn’t without controversy and doubt.

This article was correct as of February 2025. AI tools are updated regularly and it is possible that some features have changed since this article was written. Some features may also only be available in certain countries.

What is DeepSeek?

When it was unveiled in January 2025, DeepSeek took the tech industry by surprise. First, its new reasoning model called DeepSeek R1 was widely considered to be a match for ChatGPT. Second, with the US having placed restrictions on China receiving the highest-performance chips, the model was said to be running on older chipsets – prompting questions over whether AI really needed the most cutting edge tech.

As such, a record $593 billion was wiped off the market value of chip giant Nvidia in a single day and ripples soon spread. DeepSeek’s claim to have spent just $6m/£4.8m/AU$9.4m training its chatbot – far less than that of ChatGPT – certainly startled tech companies in Silicon Valley and it also showed that the US wasn’t necessarily the only country at the forefront of the AI revolution.

Since then, however, many governments worldwide have been expressing security and privacy concerns. Worryingly, research conducted by Enkrypt AI found DeepSeek is 11 times more dangerous than other AI chatbots. But there’s still no getting around the fact that DeepSeek was a breakthrough.

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(Image credit: Future/Lance Ulanoff)

What can you use DeepSeek for?

DeepSeek can be used for a wide variety of tasks from asking questions about a huge range of topics to searching for information online and within large datasets – as with other chatbots, it has been trained on large amounts of real-world and synthetic data.

It’s also capable of generating text from prompts so you can get it to write documents, emails, stories, scripts, poems and more. And, just as with ChatGPT, you can also get it to produce, debug and optimize code, breaking down programming barriers and speeding up development time. Thanks to reasoning capabilities, DeepSeek can think before it answers to inferences and draw conclusions as well.

What can’t you use DeepSeek for?

You can’t use DeepSeek to ask questions about sensitive political topics related to China. Infamous examples are questions that involve references to the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre – they happened in 1989, led to deaths ranging in number from a few hundred to several thousand, and are well-documented outside of China, but DeepSeek just won’t discuss it. It’ll tend to tell you that it’s beyond its current scope and ask you to talk about something else.

How much does DeepSeek cost?

Deepseek is open source and you can access the DeepSeek-V3 model for free which is perhaps one of the reasons why it’s had such a rapid rise, because it’s effectively opening powerful AI to all. Money is one thing, but what about the cost in terms of privacy and security? DeepSeek’s

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says “we store the information we collect in secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China”. It’s storing your email address, phone number, date of birth and chat histories.

Where can you use DeepSeek?

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is available to use via a browser but there are also native apps for iOS and

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which you can use to access the chatbot.

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(Image credit: Octavio Castillo)

Is DeepSeek any good?

DeepSeek is a very powerful chatbot – if it was poor, the US markets wouldn’t have been thrown into turmoil over it. But questions about this AI go beyond the actual technical nature of it. You just can’t shy away from the privacy and security concerns being raised, given DeepSeek’s deep-seated connection to China.

Neither can you ignore claims from OpenAI that DeepSeek was trained on its model which, again, shows there’s a lot we need to know about DeepSeek. TechRadar’s editor-at-large Lance Ulanoff is certainly cautious. “There is no reason to trust DeepSeek and its backers’ claims,” he said. “I think the truth about the time and financial investment it took them to get here will come out.”

Use DeepSeek if…

You want a free, powerful chatbot that has great reasoning powers and you’re not bothered that it doesn’t have tools offered by ChatGPT such as Canvas or that it can’t interact with customized GPTs. You should also use DeepSeek if you want a simpler experience because it can feel a bit more streamlined when compared to the ChatGPT experience.

Don’t use DeepSeek if…

You want to generate images, because DeepSeek is purely text-based. For that, you’re better off using ChatGPT which has a superb image generator in DALL-E. You should also avoid DeepSeek if you want an AI with multimodal capabilities (you can’t upload an image and start asking questions about it). And, once again, without wishing to bang the same drum, don’t use DeepSeek if you’re worried about privacy and security.

Also consider

The best alternative to DeepSeek is obviously

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– the pair, by and large, do much the same thing but the latter goes further with the likes of image generation and its security and privacy policies feel more reassuring. You may also want to consider

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. We pitted Gemini 2.0 Flash against DeepSeek R1 so it’s worth seeing how they fared.

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#DeepSeek #Chinas #people #talking

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