As of mid-February 2025, the Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek had around 47 million daily active users. When DeepSeek released its research paper illustrating the capabilities of their chatbot, a global audience became aware of the company. As a result, the number of daily active users skyrocketed.

In January 2025, deepseek.com attracted a total of 278 million visits. Male users accounted for over two-thirds. With a fraction of costs to develop its advanced large language model, the Chinese company Deepseek has rapidly emerged as a significant player in the global AI industry. Its chatbot app hit 20 million daily active users in just three weeks.

At the end of January 2025, the Chinese AI company Deepseek made global headlines with its cost-effective large language model (LLM), which rivals industry leaders like OpenAI's GPT-4o, sending shockwaves through the global tech community. The web traffic of deepseek.com surged to 278 million visits on desktop and mobile in January 2025, compared to only 12 million visits in the previous month. The company's home country contributed almost a quarter of the desktop traffic, followed by the United States and Brazil.

At the end of January 2025, Deepseek recorded a spike in its web traffic after media reports highlighted the company's efficient and affordable large language model, which disrupted the global AI landscape. Younger internet users have exhibited a strong enthusiasm. That month, around 57 percent of deepseek.com's visitors were between 18 and 34 years old.

As of January 2025, the leading generative artificial intelligence (AI) smartphone app in South Korea was ChatGPT, with almost five million users. The Chinese-developed service DeepSeek-R1 showed rapid user growth, having been initially released that month.

Comparison of Represents the average of coding benchmarks in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (LiveCodeBench & SciCode) by Model

In January 2025, ChatGPT was the most downloaded generative AI mobile app worldwide, with over 40.5 million downloads. DeepSeek ranked second, with 17.6 million downloads, while the app's domestic version for the Chinese market ranked fifth and added 7.8 million downloads to the AI brand. Google Gemini ranked third with approximately 10 million global downloads from global users during January 2025.

Comparison of Context Window: Tokens Limit; Higher is better by Model

TikTok's parent company ByteDance is currently leading the generative AI race in China. Doubao, an artificial intelligence-generated content app owned by ByteDance, had accumulated over 30 million monthly active users in China in July 2024. After surpassing Baidu's Ernie Bot in November 2023 for the first time, Doubao is gaining traction and had 860 thousand more users than the second placeholder in the spring of 2024. Ernie Bot's monthly active user size was only a third of Doubao. Moonshot AI's Kimi Smart Assistant came in third with a wide margin at around 6.3 million users.

Comparison of Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index vs. Context Window (Tokens) by Model

Comparison of Latency (Time to First Token) vs. Output Speed (Output Tokens per Second) by Model

Comparison of Image Input Price: USD per 1k images at 1MP (1024x1024) by Model

Comparison of Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index vs. End-to-End Seconds to Output 100 Tokens by Model

Comparison of Represents the average of math benchmarks in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (AIME 2024 & Math-500) by Model

Comparison of Output Speed (Output Tokens per Second) vs. Price (USD per M Tokens) by Model

Comparison of Intelligence Index incorporates 7 evaluations spanning reasoning, knowledge, math & coding by Model

Comparison of Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index vs. Price (USD per M Tokens) by Model