Introduction

If you’ve been on the news lately, you may have seen the new AI model called Deepseek take the American tech space by storm. In fact, it’s getting so popular that some are even fearing for the futures of Gemini, ChatGPT, and Meta. 

The question is, what’s so different about this new AI model? What does it do that the likes of ChatGPT haven’t achieved yet? That’s exactly what we’re going to find out in today’s guide.

What is Deepseek?

We’re all familiar with ChatGPT, but you probably know little about the new AI model, Deepseek. Released in 2023, the model didn’t start gaining momentum until the release of its latest version, Deepseek RT, in January 2025. 

What do we know about it so far? Well, firstly, this latest model has 671 billion parameters, which may seem inferior to GPT-4’s 1.8 trillion parameters. However, it only costs about $5.5 million to train – a little over 5% of ChatGPT’s $100 million. As of late, Deepseek RT has been topping the Apple App Store charts in the US, UK, and China. Ever since its launch, global tech stocks haven’t been doing their best. In fact, Nvidia lost nearly $600 billion in market value following the model's announcement!

Why Deepseek May Be Better Than ChatGPT

A quick Reddit search will tell you that almost everyone likes Deepseek better than ChatGPT. The question is why. Well, we did our research, and we’ll break it down for you.

More “Open”

It’s hard to judge an AI model based on the outputs since there are just about endless uses for a single model. So, there will always be areas where ChatGPT beats Deepseek and vice versa. For instance, users have noticed that the Chinese government actually censors certain answers on the Deepseek chatbot. 

But there is one thing we can measure. Deepseek delivers everything OpenAI promised us ChatGPT would be: a completely open AI model. It’s in their name! 

In fact, ChatGPT has almost entirely shed its original “open” ethos. Meanwhile, Deepseek is entirely open-source, and so far, it has stuck to its promise. You can easily download Deepseek R1 for free and run it locally on your own device. 

That also means you can guarantee the safety of your data since it doesn’t get shared with Deepseek at all. You can also use the open-source platform to find a way around skewed results or censorship.

More Affordable

As we mentioned, Deepseek’s training costs were only a small fraction of ChatGPT’s. Yes, their parameters are different, too, but they’re still not proportional to their training costs. In fact, most AI companies spend tens of millions to train their models, but Deepseek pulled it off with just $5.5 million. 

The good news is, Deepseek users get to benefit from this price difference, too. It only costs $0.14 to get API access to Deepseek RI with one million tokens. That translates to around 750,000 words, which is more than enough for the average user. 

At the same time, the results are pretty identical to OpenAI’s o1 model, which costs around $7.50 for one million tokens. That’s a huge cost disparity!

Better Outputs

Yes, we did say that you can’t efficiently compare the outputs of these models, and we stand by that. But in some (many) cases, Deepseek is simply better. 

There’s no denying that ChatGPT is still superior when you’re looking for a more creative or conversational output. It also does a pretty good job of keeping up with current events and news. 

However, if you use AI models for technical tasks, it’s best to stick to Deepseek. That includes projects like coding, logical reasoning, or mathematical equations. Most users agree that Deepseek excels in these scenarios.

Other than that, most results from Deepseek and ChatGPT tend to be pretty equal.

Conclusion

To wrap it up, Deepseek is a better choice in terms of being more affordable and open-source. While the outputs are pretty equal, that’s still a bad rep for ChatGPT. That’s because Deepseek is practically free to use, while GPT-4 users have to pay up to $20 a month – not cheap!

To convince users to keep paying this premium, ChatGPT has to offer something better and never-seen-before, which hasn’t been the case so far. As of now, the price difference is too big for users not to switch to Deepseek forever.

Do you use any of these tools? If yes, tell us how was your experience?