DeepSeek's AI Assistant from China has become the top free iPhone app

Chinese AI assistant DeepSeek has become the top rated free app on Apple's App Store in the US and elsewhere, beating out ChatGPT and other rivals. It's powered by the open-source DeepSeek V3 model, which reportedly requires far less computing power than competitors and was developed for under 6 million, according to (disputed) claims by the company. At the same time, it offers performance that's on par with Claude-3.5, GPT-4o and other rivals, DeepSeek said last week. Available on web, app and API, DeepSeek is similar to AI Assistant like ChatGPT with features like coding content creation and research. Its first DeepSeek-R1 release is available under an MIT license, so it can be used commercially and without restrictions.