This whole DeepSeek copying ChatGPT accusation from OpenAI and Microsoft reminds me of a lesson I’ve learned over the past 15 years of writing about this stuff — most people do not care if something is a copycat. They will go for the thing that is cheaper and better.
Nobody cares that the Xiaomi SU7 EV is a clear rip-off of the Porsche Taycan. It’s significantly cheaper, a little faster and has a longer range. To a consumer, the choice is obvious (hypothetically speaking, given shipping restrictions to the U.S.).
Bringing it closer to home, nobody batted an eyelid at Aldi copying big brand products and selling them at lower costs under their own brand names, but it’s one of the fastest growing grocery stores in the country and the products are often selected in blind taste tests.
That’s not to say this is a perfect formula (looking at you, Instagram Threads and every laptop that tries to topple the M3 MacBook Air), but the principle is sound. When something is cheaper, that is a real factor in a person’s buying decision that overwrites originality most of the time.
I’m bringing up these examples to make a very simple point. People have two choices: either a system that you may have to pay for (ChatGPT), or a free-to-use AI assistant that has been proven to be the equivalent of a model that costs up to $200 a month.
I don’t know about you, but for most people going forward, the decision is obvious.
Doing more with less
So let’s get a lay of the land here. DeepSeek R1 blindsided us all on Monday — the Chinese-made AI model remains at the top of Apple’s app store list, because the company was able to train this assistant for $6 million (a fraction of the billions U.S. AI companies are paying) using older chips, and produce faster and more accurate results.
Not only that, but the reasoning part of this model is a lot clearer in showing you its thought process over OpenAI’s equivalent in o1. This subsequently caused a trillion-dollar crash in the stock market, with Nvidia being the worst hit (though it is bouncing back now) and President Trump to say it’s a “wakeup call” for America’s AI industry.
In our face-off between ChatGPT and DeepSeek, AI writer Amanda Casswell saw R1 reign supreme in “everything from problem solving and reasoning to creative storytelling and ethical solutions.” Our comparison was with ChatGPT Plus by the way ($20 a month).
Following this, DeepSeek introduced Janus — an image generation model that is (to say the least) a little rough around the edges in our own testing, but it’ll progress over time.
And sure, there is some jank to this. Since DeepSeek is a Chinese-owned company, there is a pesky censorship problem that you can work around if you get creative, and there are some major security concerns about data being seen by the Chinese government.
But the kicker to all this is that DeepSeek is open source. Users can download it and use it for themselves, look around at its innards and see how it works, and bend it to their own requirements.
Meanwhile, ChatGPT is closed source — meaning you can’t get at the underlying code. And while at first, CEO Sam Altman praised DeepSeek on his X page, OpenAI and Microsoft are now investigating whether data output from ChatGPT trained DeepSeek.
OpenAI’s business is at risk
So over the last three days, we have a suspected copycat AI assistant that is better and completely free to use. Companies care, The U.S. Government cares, but consumers won’t because of their point of view, which will be “I don’t want to spend $20 to help with my homework, I’ll use the one that is free.”
Moreover, DeepSeek could be a massive risk to OpenAI’s other business in licensing its AI model API to other companies. Recall (no not that Recall) is a nice little tool that I use to collect content that I see on my day-to-day on the internet, summarize it, find connections between it all and even ask questions of all this info to tap into the knowledge graph for quick multi-faceted answers.
According to OpenAI’s API documentation, the cost of using its tech is broken down into the amount of tokens used, and can span from $100 to $200,000 a month depending on how much your app is used.
Would a company that’s paying a lot to use ChatGPT in their own apps continue to do so, or spend way less and use DeepSeek R1? It’s open source, after all, and open source tech will always be cheaper for businesses to use than having to license closed source tech.
And let’s entertain the scenario that the U.S. government bans DeepSeek (like what was attempted with TikTok). It’s out there and people can take that model and use it for themselves — hosting it on their own servers where the Chinese government can’t pry.
By the way, none of this even factors in the other big risk of President Trump introducing tariffs on chips coming from Taiwan. Most industry experts predict it will raise the prices of computing gear quite significantly.
But more specific to the likes of OpenAI and Meta who are in this AI race, these tariffs could make Nvidia’s super powerful GPUs that run their models way more expensive. That’s going to actively stop US companies from being competitive.
Don’t be bitter, be better
It takes me back to something my Grandad said when I was a kid: “don’t be bitter, be better.” Yes, that sounds like it was ripped straight off an inspirational Pinterest board, but I believe the point stands true here.
The AI arms race has seen a new competitor enter the fray out of nowhere — DeepSeek R1 has reached parity with OpenAI in the most important ways.
Whether it’s accomplished this feat through legitimately training the model from scratch or distilling the knowledge from OpenAI’s models is irrelevant, because (and I repeat) most people do not care about copycats, they care about price.
It’s time to be better.
More from Tom's Guide
- What is DeepSeek? — everything to know
- Is DeepSeek a national security threat? I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and DeepSeek itself
- I tested the Plaud Note AI voice recorder — here’s my verdict
