DeepSeek recently made headlines for disrupting the AI industry and the stock market with its chatbot, rocketing the app to the number one spot in the iOS App Store.
Here’s how the China-based chatbot compares to the App Store’s former reigning chatbot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Price
DeepSeek has shaken up the AI chatbot industry by offering all of its features completely free. This is a stark contrast to ChatGPT, where the prices range from $0 to $200/month.
The price of ChatGPT depends on what you need from the chatbot. There’s a Free plan, along with two paid individual plans: Plus and Pro. There are also Team and Enterprise plans for workplaces to take advantage of.
If you’re looking for help with everyday tasks, the Free level includes access to the GPT-4o mini AI model, limited access to GPT-4o, file uploads, advanced data analysis, web browsing and image generation, access to the standard voice mode and the ability to use custom GPTs. This costs $0.
Plus offers expanded access for further productivity and creativity. This tier includes everything that comes with the Free plan, extended limits on messaging, file uploads, advanced data analysis and image generation, standard and advanced voice modes, limited access to o1 and o1-mini and the option to create custom GPTs. Plus users can also test new features as they are released. This plan is priced at $20/month.
Finally, there’s ChatGPT Pro. This tier gives you the highest level of access to ChatGPT, including everything that comes with the Plus plan, unlimited access to o1, o1-mini, GPT-4o, and voice, higher limits for video and screen sharing in voice, extended access to Sora video generation and access to o1 pro mode. This plan comes in at a steep $200/month.
For more details on how the five ChatGPT plans compare, you can head to OpenAI’s pricing page.
DeepSeek is as powerful as ChatGPT
According to DeepSeek, the DeepSeek-R1 model offers performance that is on par with that of OpenAI’s newest AI model, OpenAI-o1, which is designed to be better at complex reasoning tasks – such as science and programming – than the GPT-4o model currently available with the ChatGPT Free plan.
While limited access to the o1 model is available with ChatGPT Plus, only Pro members have unlimited access to this model. This makes it less accessible to most than DeepSeek’s free R1 model.
To pit them head-to-head, I asked both DeepSeek and ChatGPT to explain the most difficult math problem they knew using my free accounts on either website. Both chatbots provided a brief background of the problem, along with three bullet points under a ‘Why is it difficult?’ header. Both chatbots also explained why the problem was significant. ChatGPT asked whether I would like a deeper explanation of certain functions or a visual representation, while DeepSeek named other problems I could ask about in follow-up questions.
I then asked each chatbot what the most significant thing to happen in the world in the past week was. ChatGPT told me that the Doomsday Clock had been adjusted to move closer to midnight and provided a link to a Time article from that morning. DeepSeek, on the other hand, informed me that its knowledge cutoff was October 2023 and that it cannot provide real-time updates from the past week. Instead, it recommended I visit BBC, Reuters, The New York Times or Al Jazeera for the latest global developments.
ChatGPT has a voice mode
One feature ChatGPT has that DeepSeek has yet to add to its chatbot is voice mode. This feature essentially allows ChatGPT to function as a smarter alternative to voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Siri (before Apple integrated ChatGPT).
Not only can you hold a live conversation with the chatbot, but it also allows you to upload images and discuss them. For example, you can send a photo of the contents of your fridge and ask for a step-by-step recipe, ask ChatGPT to read you a bedtime story or submit a screenshot of a problem from your child’s maths homework and ask for hints to help solve it without outright giving away the answer.
This technology has also been harnessed by other brands to offer new experiences. For example, Spotify has used ChatGPT’s voice mode to translate podcasts into different languages while emulating the podcast host’s own voice.
DeepSeek is open source
DeepSeek describes itself as fully open-source, with researchers and developers able to access the code and weights at no cost. This means developers can use and modify the chatbot to work for them.
Despite being founded as a non-profit organisation, OpenAI does not allow developers to access its code for free and ChatGPT is not open source. Instead, they must pay a set price per 1M tokens used in requests after fine-tuning OpenAI base models with their own training data.
Early verdict
Both DeepSeek and ChatGPT are incredibly powerful AI models.
DeepSeek’s free and open-source business model could convince more users to start using chatbots and developing apps with them, while ChatGPT’s voice mode and ability to search the web for recent news give the OpenAI chatbot better knowledge and context of current events.
