Only two weeks in and AI phenomenon DeepSeek is officially growing faster than ChatGPT

Similiarweb data claims DeepSeek’s usage doubled to 12 million people worldwide in the space of two days
Release of DeepSeek’s R1 model has prompted panic in Western AI leaders worried about their bottom line
ChatGPT continues to outperform DeepSeek in sheer page hits, but not in growth

In the space of two weeks, open source and MIT-licenced Chinese large language model (LLM) DeepSeek has taken the AI tool world by storm, sending Western AI-leader Nvidia stock plummeting and prompting OpenAI’s Sam Altman to accuse DeepSeek’s developers of using its models to train theirs.

Western AI figureheads are right to be on their toes, as new data shared exclusively with TechRadar Pro from Similarweb has shown DeepSeek’s centralised web and mobile app version (the nature of open source means that users can run various models locally on their own hardware, which Similarweb would not have data for) is seeing considerable growth.

ChatGPT versus DeepSeek

Let’s zero in on late January, as that’s when DeepSeek’s new, advanced ‘R1’ model was released. Between January 24 and January 26 2025, worldwide daily visits to DeepSeek doubled from 6.2 million to 12.4 million.

Blips in DeepSeek’s page traffic did come in the week before the model’s release, with a pronounced drop of 900,000 page views between January 15 and 18. Since January 19 (the day before the model’s release), however, the service saw steady, albeit inconsistent growth, culminating in that two-day surge; the latest data we have.

ChatGPT, meanwhile, has seen precipitous drops in page traffic before and during the release period for R1, indicating it may have already become old-hat in the eyes of many with their eye on the LLM space without DeepSeek entering the fray. The service lost 43.1 million views between January 15-18, while the biggest fall post-R1’s release came between January 23-25, with a loss of 41.3 million views.

It’s possible these are natural ebbs and flows, and that ChatGPT is bound to see bigger losses because it’s a larger operation that has been in the public consciousness for longer. It’s also important to note, although ChatGPT has seen these recent drops, the losses still amount to four times the amount of views that DeepSeek has amassed according to the latest SimilarWeb data. ChatGPT is hardly ‘dying’, either; it still managed a strong peak of 140.6 million views on January 23, three days after the release of DeepSeek R1.

The main worry, then, is growth; ChatGPT seems to have run out of it; amassing an average of 126.9 million page views in the week of DeepSeek’s latest model release, and only being able to achieve sporadic daily peaks of around 140 million views over non-consecutive days in that period. Both of these figures don’t represent growth over previous months according to the data. A glance at the available SimilarWeb figures tells me that ChatGPT was pulling in comparable numbers as late as December 2024 and as early as September.

DeepSeek may have only amassed a mean average of 7.45 million views in the same period, but that two-day doubling will concern interested competitors. The questions in play, that we just don’t know the answer to yet, are ‘how long will this rate of growth continue’ and ‘can DeepSeek become a meaningful long-term competitor in AI’? While anyone keen on competition in the space (specifically from a model able to be hosted locally) might be hopeful about the latter, the fact remains ChatGPT is a juggernaut, and it’ll be no easy feat.

What is DeepSeek?

In case you missed it, DeepSeek is a Chinese company that has managed to train R1, a model “on par with ChatGPT” and Copilot for $6 million (£4.8 million), a fraction of the cost of the $78 million] spent by OpenAI in training its latest GPT-4, all while the country endures an embargo of powerful high-end graphical processing units (GPUs) from the West.

DeepSeek began as a startup in May 2023, with founder Liang Wenfeng putting his stockpiling of Nvidia GPUs down to “curiosity” as opposed to business acumen in 2021 – before former US President Joe Biden introduced export sanctions on semiconductors to China in October 2022.

For SMBs, DeepSeek R1 is freely available on Github, and, being MIT-licensed, represents a significant opportunity for low-cost AI chatbot implementation. It’s a powerful model that, unlike ChatGPT or Copilot, can be run locally, and on modest hardware.

While rumbles of data leaks have emerged surrounding the web and Android app versions, it’s important to note that running the model yourself allows for sidestepping these concerns.