Is DeepSeek Better than ChatGPT?
Is DeepSeek better than ChatGPT? That's the big question everyone is currently asking! DeepSeek excels in cost efficiency, transparency, and technical capabilities, making it ideal for enterprises seeking lower operational expenses and better performance in technical tasks. But from most of the data currently available it still falls short of OpenAI's ChatGPT in just about every metric. It goes back to the old saying "You get what you pay for". Either way though we're going to be taking a quick look at this trending new AI tool that somehow managed to wipe 465 billion dollars of NVIDIA stock market value.
Is DeepSeek Better than ChatGPT?
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI application founded by Liang Wenfeng, that offers a low-cost AI model that recently exploded into popularity, contributing to Nvidia's $589 billion drop in market value—the largest in history—after investor concerns about DeepSeek’s disruptive potential surfaced. Analysts attribute this to DeepSeek’s ability to achieve high performance without relying heavily on expensive hardware. But is it actually any good? Well, that really depends on what you are using it for and how much you're willing to pay for it. There's also a lot of conflicting information about DeepSeek being open-source. I spent quite a bit of time hunting around for information and it appears to be semi-transparent but not fully so it doesn't get an Open Source tick at least not in 2025.
At this stage in development, DeepSeek doesn't stack up to OpenAI's chatGPT in any other area outside of its superior API pricing and efficiency. However, you are ultimately getting what you pay for. Here's a quick example of quite a common prompt result when using DeepSeek.
And here's an example of what you'll get when asking ChatGPT.
The Pros of DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence
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AI Transparency: It apparently makes fact-checking easier (I didn't see that during testing)
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Low-Cost Efficiency: It's a lot more efficient (apparently) but the results are of less quality so is it really more efficient? Questions might cost less to answer but you'll probably have to ask more questions to get the results you want which seems like it would ultimately cost about the same in power and money.
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Wide Availability: Accessible on both Apple and Android app stores.
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Affordable API Access: API pricing starts at just $0.14 per million tokens, significantly lower than OpenAI’s $7.50 per million tokens.
- ChatBot Functions: It works reasonably well as a basic chatbot but nothing like ChatGPT's o1 models. However, chatbots aren't that desirable these days as they are still quite generic.
The Pros of ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence
So where is Openai ChatGPT better than DeepSeek? Well pretty much everywhere except cost. ChatGPT is significantly more expensive per million tokens.
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Advanced AI Capabilities: ChatGPT manages to pull far better results than DeepSeek in just about every scenario. And is less prone to repeating the same junk. However, it still has issues of its own.
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Extensive Training Data: Trained on a broad dataset for diverse use cases. (Publically available data and probably 100x more stolen data) which they are currently battling in court.
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User-Friendly Interface: While both tools have almost identical interfaces ChatGPTs seems a little cleaner and has more options inside of account and profile settings.
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Paid Tiers: Subscription plans provide faster responses and access to newer models like GPT-4. But you'll be paying a ton of money for them! They aren't cheap!
ChatGPT vs DeepSeek in a Chart
| Feature | DeepSeek | ChatGPT |
| Cost | Low | Free/Paid tiers |
| Transparency | Moderate | Moderate |
| Hardware Needs | Efficient with limited tech | High-performance GPUs |
| Customization | Limited | Limited customization |
| Data Privacy | Proprietary approach | Proprietary approach |
| API Pricing | $0.14 per million tokens | $7.50 per million tokens |
What's the Biggest Issue with DeepSeek?!
The biggest issue with DeepSeek moving forward is going to be its origin. Being a Chinese AI will dramatically reduce its appeal in countries like the United States, Australia, the UK, and the majority of the EU, which have been actively reducing their reliance on Chinese services. The case against TikTok and CapCut (owned by ByteDance) is a classic example of this. While it might eventually become a great AI tool, countries will more than likely ban access to it on national security grounds and concerns over data collection practices.