China's DeepSeek AI assistant becomes top free iPhone app as US tech stocks take a hit

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. The news that DeepSeek topped the App Store charts caused a sharp drop in tech stocks like NVIDIA and ASML this morning. Google parent company Alphabet and Microsoft were also down this morning.