DeepSeek AI User Statistics and Facts (2025)
DeepSeek AI went live in January 2025 and since then it has been ranking #1 on the App Store in the top free app category pushing ChatGPT to the 2nd position in the United States.
Its app has been downloaded over 10 million times worldwide across all app stores within 15 days of launch making it one of the most downloaded apps. The DeepSeek website attracted over 173.8 million traffic and engagement worldwide in January 2025 of which 57.29% were from desktops and 42.71% from smartphones.
In this statistics blog, we have compiled the latest stats about DeepSeek AI and compared its performance with other major AI models in multiple benchmarks, providing a complete idea.
Top DeepSeek AI Statistics in 2025
- DeepSeek AI's iOS and Android app was downloaded over 10 million times within 15 days of its launch.
- DeepSeek supports over 80 programming languages.
- China contributes 35% of DeepSeek app downloads on iOS and India accounts for 13% on Android.
- 71.57% of the platform's users are male, while 28.43% are female.
- DeepSeek-R1 scored 79.8% in the AIME-2024 benchmark, surpassing OpenAI-o1-12217's score of 79.2%.
- The input cost for DeepSeek-R1 is $0.55 per million tokens, and the output cost is $2.19 per million tokens.
DeepSeek AI Important Facts
DeepSeek AI is new to the market, and most people are unaware of important facts like its parent company, employee count, founder, etc. To make it convenient, we have prepared a table with essential information about the chatbot.
| Metrics | DeepSeek Information |
| Launch Date | 1 May 2023 |
| Headquarters | Hangzhou, China |
| Founder | Liang Wenfeng |
| Parent Company | High-Flyer |
| Employees | 51-200 employees |
| Models | DeepSeek-R1, DeepSeek-V2, and DeepSeek-V3 |
| Availability | Free |
| Model Architecture | Mixture of Experts (MoE) |
| DeepSeek Cost | $0.14/ million input tokens
$0.28/ million output tokens |
| Programming Language Support | Over 80 programming languages |
| Total Parameters | 671 Billion |
| Activated Parameters | 37 Billion |
What is DeepSeek AI?
DeepSeek AI is a free AI-powered chatbot developed by a Chinese company with the same name. Founded in May 2023, the platform specializes in open-source large language models (LLMs). The chatbot is developed with powerful yet cost-effective models like DeepSeek-R1, rivaling GPT-4 in efficiency. This sophisticated reasoning model is designed to handle complex reasoning tasks, including math, code, and general problem-solving.
DeepSeek AI is open-source and allows free use and modification of its AI algorithms. Since its app went live on the App Store and Play Store, it has pushed ChatGPT to the second position and ranked 1 on the App Store in the United States.
DeepSeek AI Timeline
The table below showcases the complete timeline of the key events of DeepSeek AI:
| Year | Month and Date | Key Events |
| 2023 | May | DeepSeek AI was founded by Liang Wenfeng in Hangzhou, China. |
| June | Launch of DeepSeek Coder and DeepSeek LLM (67B parameters) for coding and natural language processing. | |
| 2024 | January | Launch of DeepSeek LLM (67B parameters). |
| May | Launch of DeepSeek-V2 with enhanced performance and efficiency. | |
| Late 2024 | Launch of DeepSeek Coder-V2 (236B parameters) that offers a high context window (128K tokens). | |
| 2025 | January | Launch of DeepSeek-V3 (671B parameters) and DeepSeek-R1. |
| January 10 | Launch of DeepSeek chatbot app for iOS and Android, powered by DeepSeek-R1. | |
| January 27 | Becomes the most downloaded free app on the U.S. iOS App Store. |
Source: DeepSeek AI
DeepSeek AI Users
The DeepSeek app was downloaded over 10 million times across iOS and Android devices worldwide within 20 days of its launch on January 10, 2025. In contrast, the ChatGPT and Gemini apps were downloaded roughly 2.6 million and 783,632 times within their first launch month. According to the latest data, DeepSeek is already ahead of ChatGPT and Gemini concerning app downloads.
DeepSeek AI Downloads by Country
Since the DeepSeek AI app launch on the App Store and Play Store, its download numbers have skyrocketed worldwide with China, the United States, and India leading the list.
- 35% of the DeepSeek app downloads on iOS are from China, followed by the United States and Russian Federation with 13% and 4%, respectively.
- India accounted for 13% of DeepSeek AI’s Android app downloads, followed by South Korea at 10% and Brazil at 9%.
The table below shows the total number of DeepSeek AI app downloads on iOS and Android by country:
- iOS downloads
| Country | Downloads | |
| China | 35% | 1 million |
| United States | 13% | 500K |
| Russian Federation | 4% | 100K |
| France | 4% | 200K |
| Germany | 3% | 100K |
| Vietnam | 3% | 100K |
| United Kingdom | 3% | 100K |
| Japan | 3% | 100K |
| India | 2% | 100K |
| Saudi Arabia | 2% | 100K |
| Others | 28% | – |
- Android downloads
| Country | Downloads | |
| India | 13% | 500K |
| South Korea | 10% | 500K |
| Brazil | 9% | 200K |
| Pakistan | 6% | 200K |
| Russian Federation | 6% | 200K |
| Egypt | 6% | 200K |
| United States | 6% | 200K |
| Indonesia | 5% | 200K |
| Mexico | 3% | 100K |
| Saudi Arabia | 3% | 100K |
| Others | 33% | – |
Source: Statista, AppMagic, Google Play
DeepSeek AI User Demographics Statistics
- 7 out of 10 DeepSeek AI users are males, compared to 28.43% of females.
- Over 34.47% of DeepSeek’s user base is from the 25 to 34 age group, the highest among others. The 18 to 24 age group comes in second, representing 22.03% of the platform’s users.
- Users aged 35 to 44 years account for 19.82% of the DeepSeek user base, while those aged 45 to 54 account for 13.11%.
- 4.14% of the platform's user base are aged over 65 years.
DeepSeek AI App Store Position Statistics
Within a week of launch, the DeepSeek AI app topped the United States App Store's Top Free Category, placing the ChatGPT app second. An app needs over 200,000 daily downloads to rank first on the US Apple App Store list. This aligns with the DeepSeek AI app download statistics mentioned above.
- As of the end of January 2025, the DeepSeek app is in the 6th position in the App Store's Top Free Apps list in around 60 countries worldwide.
- 80% of the app's downloads happened in the last 10 days, boosting its rank from 815th on January 19th to 1st on January 31st, 2025.
Source: AppMagic
DeepSeek AI Google Trends Statistics
Google Trends data shows that DeepSeek search surged in the U.S. within 20 days of launch, reaching about 100 million searches. In comparison, ChatGPT recorded over 700 million searches during the same period.
In the United States, the District of Columbia tops the DeepSeek search list followed by California, New Jersey, Washington, and Maryland. In comparison, Myanmar, Nepal, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Kenya were the top 5 countries where DeepSeek AI was searched the most.
DeepSeek AI Traffic Statistics
As of January 28, 2025, deepseek.com received over 173.8 million traffic worldwide, a whopping 1374.46% more than 11.79 million in December 2024. The website ranks 9th in the "Programming and Developer Software list and 207th worldwide.
- DeepSeek AI’s traffic is 57.29% from desktops and 42.71% from mobile web.
- The website's average daily traffic is roughly 6.207 million and an average session lasts around 5 minutes and 46 seconds.
- The bounce rate of DeepSeek AI's website is about 31.66%.
- China contributes roughly 22.20% of deepseek.com's total traffic, the highest of all countries.
- The U.S. and India rank second and third accounting for 9.01% and 6.42% traffic, respectively.
- Egypt ranks fourth with a 6.25% traffic share, while Germany ranks fifth contributing 3.89%.
- 42.84% of deepseek.com's traffic comes from organic searches, while 49.7% comes from direct searches.
- The top organic search terms for deepseek.com are deepseek, deep seek, deepseek r1, deepseek ai, and deepseek v3.
- YouTube contributes around 48.13% of the traffic share of DeepSeek's website, followed by X (Twitter) and Facebook with 23.15% and 8.10%, respectively.
- LinkedIn and Reddit rank fourth and fifth accounting for 4.69% and 3.08% of the traffic share, respectively.
Source: SimilarWeb
DeepSeek AI vs. OpenAI Comparison Statistics
Recent studies show that the DeepSeek-R1 model performs similarly to the OpenAI-o1-1217 model in reasoning tasks. The DeepSeek-R1-Zero model, trained through large-scale reinforcement, showcases impressive reasoning skills and powerful, intriguing behaviors. DeepSeek demonstrated comparable performance to OpenAI, often surpassing it in certain scenarios. Here are some interesting statistics data showcasing the comparison between DeepSeek and OpenAI in different benchmarks.
- In the AIME-2024 performance, DeepSeek-R1 scored 79.8%, slightly higher than 79.2% of OpenAI-o1-1217. DeepSeek-R1-32B scored 72.6%, while OpenAI-o1-mini, and DeepSeek-V3 scored 63.6% and 39.2%, respectively.
- In the Codeforces performance, DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI-o1-1217 performed on par with 96.3% and 96.6% scores, respectively.
- In the GPQA Diamond performance, OpenAI-o1-1217 scored 75.7%, performing better than DeepSeek-R1 with 71.5%.
- In the MATH-500 performance, DeepSeek-R1 scored 97.3%, higher than OpenAI-o1-1217 with 96.4%.
- In the MMLU performance, OpenAI-o1-1217 scored 91.8%, slightly higher than DeepSeek-R1 with 90.8%.
- In the SWE-bench Verified performance, DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI-o1-1217 performed similarly with 49.2% and 48.9%, respectively.
The table below shows the benchmark performance data of DeepSeek-R1 vs. OpenAI-o1-1217 vs. DeepSeek-R1-32B vs. OpenAI-o1-mini vs. DeepSeek-V3.
| Benchmarks | DeepSeek-R1 | OpenAI-o1-1217 | DeepSeek-R1-32B | OpenAI-o1-mini | DeepSeek-V3 | Winner |
| AIME-2024 | 79.8% | 79.2% | 72.6% | 63.6% | 39.2% | DeepSeek |
| Codeforces | 96.3% | 96.6% | 90.6% | 93.4% | 58.7% | OpenAI |
| GPQA Diamond | 71.5% | 75.7% | 62.1% | 60% | 59.1% | OpenAI |
| MATH-500 | 97.3% | 96.4% | 94.3% | 90% | 90.2% | DeepSeek |
| MMLU | 90.8% | 91.8% | 87.4% | 85.2% | 88.5% | OpenAI |
| SWE-bench Verified | 49.2% | 48.9% | 36.8% | 41.6% | 42% | DeepSeek |
Source: Arxiv
DeepSeek vs. Gemini vs. Qwen vs. GPT4o Benchmark Comparison Statistics
Like DeepSeek, Qwen is another large language model launched by another Chinese brand, Alibaba Cloud. It was launched in April 2023 and handles multiple tasks, such as natural language understanding, generation, and visual language processing.
Qwen is built on Meta's Llama model and has evolved with various updates, including Qwen 2.5-Max, launched in January 2025. Like DeepSeek, it offers open-source versions, allowing developers to modify and use them for multiple tasks.
Below, we have compared the benchmark scores of DeepSeek, Gemini, Qwen, and GPT4o models.
| Benchmarks | DeepSeek-R1 | Gemini 1.5 Pro (002) | Qwen2.5-Max | GPT-4o |
| MMLU | 90.8% | NA | 87.9% | 88.7% |
| MMLU-Pro | 84% | 75.8% | 69% | 74.68% |
| BBH | NA | NA | 89.3% | NA |
| C-Eval | NA | NA | 92.2% | NA |
| CMMLU | NA | NA | 91.9% | NA |
| MMMU | NA | 65.9% | NA | 69.1% |
| HellaSwag | NA | 93.3% | NA | NA |
| HumanEval | NA | 84.1% | 73.2% | 90.2% |
| MBPP | NA | NA | 80.6% | NA |
| CRUX-I | NA | NA | 70.1% | NA |
| CRUX-O | NA | NA | 79.1% | NA |
| MATH | 97.5% | 86.5% | 68.5% | 75.9% |
| GPQA | 71.5% | 59.1% | NA | 53.6% |
| GSM8K | NA | NA | 94.5% | NA |
| IFEval | 83.3% | NA | NA | NA |
- In the MMLU-Pro benchmark, DeepSeek-R1 scored 84%, higher than Qwen2.5-Max and GPT-4o.
- Qwe2.5-Max scored 89.4% in the Arena-Hard benchmark, higher than DeepSeek-V3 and GPT-4o.
- In the LiveBench benchmark, Qwe2.5-Max scored 62.2%, higher than DeepSeek-V3 and GPT-4o.
Source: Qwen, DocBot 1, DocsBot 2, DocsBot 3
DeepSeek AI Cost Comparison Against Other AI Models
According to various AI statistic reports, the input cost for processing tokens of DeepSeek-R1 is $0.55 per million tokens. Whereas, its output cost for tokens generated by the model is $2.19 per million tokens.
In comparison, the input cost for processing tokens of Gemini 1.5 Pro (002) is $1.25 per million tokens, while the output cost is $5 per million tokens. Whereas, the price for similar tasks of GPT-4o is $2.50 per million tokens (input cost) and $10 per million tokens (output cost).
DeepSeek-R1 has a significantly lower input and output token cost than Gemini 1.5 Pro (002) and GPT-4o. The table below shows the price of input and output tokens of the top AI models:
| Models | Input Token Cost (Per Million Tokens) | Output Token Cost (Per Million Tokens) |
| OpenAI GPT-4 | $30 | $60 |
| Claude 3.5 Sonnet | $3 | $15 |
| Gemini 1.5 Pro | $2.50 | $10 |
| Meta – Llama 301 405b | $1.79 | $1.79 |
| Amazon Nova Pro | $0.80 | $3.20 |
| DeepSeek-R1 | $0.55 | $2.19 |
Source: DocsBot
Impact of DeepSeek Launch in the United States Stocks Market
The launch of DeepSeek triggered a sharp selloff in the U.S. stock market, particularly in the tech sector. Here are some interesting statistics points you should know:
- Since the launch of the DeepSeek AI app, the US market lost $1 trillion with top tech companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google facing major declines.
- Nvidia suffered a massive loss from this launch, with its stock plunging 17%, wiping out nearly $600 billion in market value. Whereas, Microsoft‘s stock fell by 2.14%, while Google‘s dropped by 4%.
- The SandP 500 tech sector also dropped by a staggering 5.6%, marking its biggest decline since September 2020.
Despite initial criticism, the wider availability of efficient AI models like DeepSeek is set to drive market growth, boosting innovation and productivity across sectors in the medium term.
Source: MSN, U.S.News, CBS News, Yahoo Finance
Drawbacks and Controversies of DeepSeek in 2025
DeepSeek’s launch has sparked controversy due to censorship, data privacy concerns, and disinformation risks. Here are some controversies and concerns of the platform you must know:
- Censorship and Bias: DeepSeek has faced criticism for aligning with Chinese government narratives. It avoids discussing sensitive topics like the Tiananmen protests and the Cultural Revolution, which raises concerns about censorship and biased responses.
- Data Privacy Issues: DeepSeek collects extensive user data, including keystroke patterns for biometric identification. This level of data collection is seen as intrusive, sparking concerns over privacy and security.
- Disinformation Risks: Experts warn that DeepSeek could be used to spread disinformation, undermine public trust, and reinforce authoritarian narratives, particularly in democratic societies.
Conclusion (Future Predictions of DeepSeek)
The launch of DeepSeek has undoubtedly disrupted the AI industry. With major tech companies losing billions of dollars, this shows how disruptive it was. The company challenges major players like OpenAI and Google with its cost-effective and efficient models. Its open-source approach has made AI accessible to all. With Alibaba launching Qwen, it is predicted that various Chinese and other countries companies will launch AI models in the future, ending the dominance of US tech giants. However, concerns about data privacy and misuse persist with Chinese platforms.
FAQs
1) Is DeepSeek better than ChatGPT?
The comparison between DeepSeek and ChatGPT depends on specific use cases. According to benchmark performance, DeepSeek is better than ChatGPT in some scenarios. However, the major difference is in the operating cost. DeepSeek is much cheaper to operate than ChatGPT.
2) Who is the owner of DeepSeek?
DeepSeek is owned and funded by the Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer. The company was founded by Liang Wenfeng in 2023.
3) Is DeepSeek free?
DeepSeek offers free access to its AI models like DeepSeek-V3 and R1. You can access its services free through its official website, and the DeepSeek app is available for free download on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store
4) What chips does DeepSeek use?
DeepSeek primarily uses NVIDIA GPUs for its models. Due to the chip ban, it uses Nvidia’s H800 chips, which it could have purchased legally in 2023. The brand also has access to Nvidia's less powerful H20 chips.
