Did the upstart Chinese tech company DeepSeek copy ChatGPT to make the artificial intelligence technology that shook Wall Street this week?

DeepSeek is the new AI chatbot on everybody’s lips and is currently sitting at the top of Apple’s App Store in the US and the UK. A completely free AI model built by a Chinese start-up, DeepSeek wants to make AI even more accessible to the masses by offering a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT o1 reasoning model without a fee.

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.