DeepSeek vs ChatGPT – how do they compare? - BBC News
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The Emergence of DeepSeek
The emergence of Chinese AI app DeepSeek has shocked financial markets, and prompted US President Donald Trump to describe it as "a wake-up call" for the US tech industry. DeepSeek's claim that its R1 artificial intelligence (AI) model was made at a fraction of the cost of its rivals has raised questions about the future of the whole industry, and caused some of the world's biggest companies to sink in value. DeepSeek has become the most downloaded free app in the US just a week after it was launched.
ChatGPT Features
When you ask ChatGPT what the most popular reasons to use ChatGPT are, it says that assisting people to write is one of them. From gathering and summarizing information in a helpful format to even writing blog posts on a topic, ChatGPT has become an AI companion for many across different workplaces. As a proud Scottish football fan, I asked ChatGPT and DeepSeek to summarize the best Scottish football players ever, before asking the chatbots to "draft a blog post summarizing the best Scottish football players in history".
DeepSeek responded in seconds, with a top ten list - Kenny Dalglish of Liverpool and Celtic was number one. It helpfully summarized which position the players played in, their clubs, and a brief list of their achievements. DeepSeek also detailed two non-Scottish players - Rangers legend Brian Laudrup, who is Danish, and Celtic hero Henrik Larsson. For its subsequent blog post, it did go into detail of Laudrup's nationality before giving a succinct account of the careers of the players.
ChatGPT's answer to the same question contained many of the same names, with "King Kenny" once again at the top of the list. Its detailed blog post briefly and accurately went into the careers of all the players. It concluded: "While the game has changed over the decades, the impact of these Scottish greats remains timeless." Indeed. For this fun test, DeepSeek was certainly comparable to its best-known US competitor.
DeepSeek in Coding
The emergence of advanced AI models has made a difference to people who code. When ChatGPT experienced an outage last week, X had a number of amusing posts from developers saying they couldn't do their work without the faithful tool by their side. Javier Aguirre, an AI researcher at Samsung Medical Center in Seoul, South Korea, specializes in researching in medicine and AI. In a post on LinkedIn, he wrote: "I am quite impressed with Deepseek. While coding, we usually try to explore AI chatbots to the limit to see their capabilities in assisting with coding."
Javier Aguirre continued, "Today I had a really tricky and complex problem. Even chatGPT o1 was not able to reason enough to solve it. I gave a try to Deepseek and it solved it at once and straight to the point." Mr. Aguirre also pointed out that for coders, the combination of models can lead to success. This was echoed by Addy Osmani, who is the Head of Chrome Developer Experience at Google. He spoke about combining DeepSeek with US AI firm Anthropic's tool Claude Sonnet. In 2023, Amazon invested $4bn into Anthropic. Mr. Osmani said: "Code with AI? DeepSeek R1 + Claude Sonnet may be the best new hybrid coding model. Yes, engineers are using them together." Mr. Osmani also said DeepSeek was "significantly cheaper" to use than both Claude Sonnet and OpenAI's o1 model.
Ideas and Storytelling
What about brainstorming? I asked ChatGPT and DeepSeek to give me "ideas for a story for children about a boy who lives on the moon". ChatGPT responded with six neatly summarized ideas. One was about a boy called Max who worked as a postman on the moon and was sent on an adventure. Another was about Oliver, who was drawn by the sounds of a mysterious orchestra made up of aliens.
DeepSeek responded with just one idea - "Luna and the Boy Who Chased the Stars". Its response was 387 words (with no mention of anyone or thing called "Luna"), and comprised a story about a curious boy called Milo who lived on the moon. While ChatGPT gave me ideas, DeepSeek wrote a full story. It wasn't particularly good, with a simple focus on a character going from A to B, but it was a start - and it was impressive how quickly it delivered it.
Explaining History
One of my memories from high school is my history teacher explaining to us how the First World War came about following a complex situation regarding many European powers, with the conflict finally sparked by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. How would the chatbots deal with explaining such a complex and nuanced piece of history? Pretty well.
ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Google's Gemini assistant all gave detailed accounts and outlined the key factors of the First World War. They provided a comprehensive explanation of the historical event, showing their capabilities in handling complex historical topics.
