DeepSeek, a new Chinese AI, challenges established US firms like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic with its cost-effective R1 model. It has quickly gained popularity, offering notable capabilities in content generation,

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been the dominant artificial intelligence platform since its launch in late 2022. People have used it for everything from organising their schedules and making travel plans to asking it to come up with cooking recipes or story ideas.

In some ways, DeepSeek was far less censored than most Chinese platforms, offering answers with keywords that would often be quickly scrubbed on domestic social media. Other times, the program eventually censored itself.

OpenAI is in talks for an investment round to raise nearly $40 billion that would value the AI startup at up to $340 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.