The launch of DeepSeek-R1 last January ushered in a new era in the realm of artificial intelligence (AI).
In November 2022, with the introduction of ChatGPT, artificial intelligence rapidly became a part of our lives and agenda, evolving every day and continuously transforming alongside new technologies. As AI models used in design, coding, and many other fields emerge, the advantages and disadvantages brought by this technology are also being intensely debated.
Artificial intelligence, which has irreversibly impacted many sectors, has now become an area of competition. With the release of new models like DeepSeek, this competition has gained even more momentum. So, where is this competition headed? The outcomes of these rapid advancements in the world of AI have become one of the greatest topics of curiosity for both technology enthusiasts and industry experts.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is introduced and developed by OpenAI, one of the market’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) businesses (Thormundsson, 2024). Based in the US, it is a large multimodal model that is able to process both text and images and generate text output.
GPT, which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, utilizes deep learning methods and extensive data training to generate human-like output. Particularly, researchers stated that they trained GPT-3, an autoregressive language model with a vast number of parameters—175 billion (Brown et al., 2020). Furthermore, the revised model, GPT-4, encompasses ten times as many parameters, according to several websites. It has the potential to be deployed in many applications like dialogue systems, text summarization, and machine translation (OpenAI, 2023).
In August 2024, OpenAI announced that its chatbot, ChatGPT, had reached more than 200 million weekly active users, which is twice as high as the number reported in November 2023 (Reuters, 2024). This widespread usage underscores its adoption and significance among many industries, from healthcare to financial services, product recommendations, and customer service.
What is DeepSeek?
DeepSeek is a chatbot owned and operated by a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup (Lu, 2025). It is built to understand and produce human-like text, which makes DeepSeek a strong competitor in the AI market. Within a week of its release, DeepSeek has risen to the top of the US app download charts (Fraser, 2025).
DeepSeek leverages large-scale language models similar to OpenAI’s GPT series. According to a report, DeepSeek presents a robust performance among a variety of tasks, and it has a comparable performance to OpenAI-o1-1217 (Guo et al., 2025). Researchers have demonstrated that DeepSeek outperforms other large language models, including Gemini, GPT, and Llama, but performs below Claude (Gao et al., 2025). Additionally, it succeeds in math, coding, and engineering tasks, exceeding the performance of most models (Liu et al., 2024).
It is predominantly optimized for Chinese and English languages (Guo et al., 2025), meeting the needs of both local and foreign users. It is adaptable for a range of applications, including customer service, content production, and language translation, because of its multimodal characteristics, which enable it to process both text and images.
Key Differences between Models
Key Differences between Models
While these models are quite capable of understanding and producing human-like text, they differ in terms of their architecture, application areas, and potential impact. Let’s take a closer look at DeepSeek and ChatGPT, which are at the forefront of the AI transformation.
| DeepSeek | ChatGPT | |
Architecture | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) which activates only relevant subsets for each task, boosting efficiency and resource optimization. | Traditional transformer model leverages all parameters for each task, assuring consistency but potentially at the cost of efficiency. |
Performance | Technical tasks—particularly math | Contextual understanding— sophisticated responses across various subjects. |
| Accessibility and Cost | Open-source, available for free | Freemium model, providing some features freely but asking a subscription for accessing more sophisticated features. |
| Ease of Use | Extensive customization, necessitating technical skill | More user-friendly, usable by non-technical users. |
In sum, DeepSeek is a noteworthy competitor in the AI chatbot market, especially for ChatGPT. It is an open-source option, bringing a new viewpoint to AI language models. DeepSeek has definitely drawn attention for its remarkable abilities and cost-effectiveness while surpassing in technical and math fields. With its flexible capabilities and user-friendly design, ChatGPT continues to hold its position, but DeepSeek’s rise makes it a powerful alternative (Chugani, 2025).
References
Brown, T. B., Mann, B., Ryder, N., Subbiah, M., Kaplan, J., Dhariwal, P., Neelakantan, A., Shyam, P., Sastry, G., Askell, A., Agarwal, S., Herbert-Voss, A., Krueger, G., Henighan, T., Child, R., Ramesh, A., Ziegler, D., Wu, J., Winter, C., … Amodei, D. (2020). Language models are few-shot learners. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 33, 1877–1901. https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165
Chugani, V. (2025, January 30). Deepseek vs. CHATGPT: Ai Model Comparison Guide for 2025. DataCamp. https://www.datacamp.com/blog/deepseek-vs-chatgpt?dc_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F
Fraser, G. (2025, January 28). Deepseek vs chatgpt – how do they compare?. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqx9zn27700o
Gao, T., Jin, J., Ke, Z. T., & Moryoussef, G. (2025). A Comparison of DeepSeek and Other LLMs. arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.03688.
Guo, D., Yang, D., Zhang, H., Song, J., Zhang, R., Xu, R., … & He, Y. (2025). Deepseek-r1: Incentivizing reasoning capability in llms via reinforcement learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.12948.
Liu, A., Feng, B., Xue, B., Wang, B., Wu, B., Lu, C., … & Piao, Y. (2024). Deepseek-v3 technical report. arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.19437.
Lu, D. (2025, January 28). We tried out DeepSeek. it worked well, until we asked it about Tiananmen Square and Taiwan. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/28/we-tried-out-deepseek-it-works-well-until-we-asked-it-about-tiananmen-square-and-taiwan
OpenAI. (2023). GPT-4 technical report. OpenAI. Retrieved from https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf
Reuters. (2024, August 29). OpenAI says ChatGPT’s weekly users have grown to 200 million. Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-says-chatgpts-weekly-users-have-grown-200-million-2024-08-29/
