The launch of the Chinese AI chatbot has turned heads in the AI market. In less than a week, downloads of the DeepSeek application have beaten those of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, as the free AI model has shown impressive knowledge in tech, math, and reasoning.
ChatGPT vs. DeepSeek. Is this the end of ChatGPT’s era or we’ve just got another smart assistant for life and business?
Well, let’s figure out what the Chinese AI tool brings to the table, where it excels and falls short compared to ChatGPT, and, most importantly—which AI model is better for integration.
At Rubyroid Labs, our AI developers have extensive experience in building AI-driven solutions for projects. Our portfolio includes chatbots for selecting sports equipment, AI assistants for fitness apps, smart data analysts for insurance enterprises, conversational AI for e-learning platforms, and more. Get in touch with us if you need expert insight on your project idea. We can help.
And now let’s go on with our ChatGPT and DeepSeek comparison.
Contents:
- DeepSeek vs. ChatGPT: A Battle or a Friendship? Key Facts
- Feature Comparison on DeepSeek and ChatGPT
- Strengths and Weaknesses of DeepSeek and ChatGPT
- Which AI Model to Choose: Best Practices for Using DeepSeek and ChatGPT in Business
- The Future Outlook for Both AI models
- Summing Up
DeepSeek vs. ChatGPT: A Battle or a Friendship? Key Facts
Released less than a month ago, the DeepSeek R1 model is a kind of dark horse—everyone’s curious but not quite sure what to expect yet.
Meanwhile, ChatGPT by OpenAI is our old buddy, sticking with us through thick and thin. It’s one of the top choices for AI integration and it absolutely nails all types of user interactions, from jokes to tech.
Let’s explore the key facts about each AI model—ChatGPT-4o and DeepSeek R1—and then define the differences between them.
DeepSeek and ChatGPT. Key Facts
Based on the facts we already know about both AI models, we’ll easily highlight the differences between them. So, let’s get started.
Fact 1. Origin
- DeepSeek R1: The Chinese company DeepSeek Inc. launched its free open-source chatbot in January 2025. The AI model turned everyone’s heads as the company showed the tech world that it’s possible to create a good and affordable product like ChatGPT4 with lower budgets and on different hardware.
- ChatGPT-4o: ChatGPT and its versions come since 2022, by the OpenAI company from the USA. This AI tool was developed on the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) framework and conquered the world by its ability to understand, ‘think’ and answer in a human way, ranging from jokes to coding.
Fact 2. Architecture
- DeepSeek R1: The model’s neural engine was created with the Mixture of Experts (MoE) approach. It’s like having multiple specialized ‘experts’ in one brain, working together. These experts are activated depending on the type of request, topic and level of complexity required. DeepSeek has an impressive 671 billion parameters in total. However, only about 37 billion are used for general tasks—and they do a great job at it.
- ChatGPT-4o: The chatbot uses a more traditional transformer-based architecture. Every time you input a question, the model processes it using its full set of parameters, which have been meticulously fine-tuned to deliver nuanced and human-like responses—especially in conversational settings.
According to rumors (as OpenAI did not officially confirm this), ChatGPT may have up to 1.8 trillion parameters across 120 layers.
Fact 3. Language Specifics
- DeepSeek R1: The AI assistant was mainly trained in Chinese and English. However, it specializes in understanding Chinese cultural nuances, local dialects, and industry-specific details. Still, the AI model can also work with other popular languages, depending on the complexity of the request.
- ChatGPT-4o: The chatbot is based on the American English language but also impressively nails working up to 59 foreign languages, which makes it a really worldwide used AI tool.
Fact 4. Intelligence Quality
- DeepSeek R1: The chatbot was built with fewer resources, but its effectiveness, deep knowledge, research capabilities, and conversational abilities have skyrocketed the AI market. The new AI tool has beated some existing popular AI models such as Claude, Gemini, and Llama.
- ChatGPT-4o: Meanwhile, the tool is considered a gold standard in conversational AI. It performs perfectly, can explain concepts of any complexity, and gives accurate responses. In its latest versions, ChatGPT can even catch user’s emotions and adjust to personal preferences.
Fact 5. The Costs per Token
- DeepSeek R1: The LLM stands out for its affordability, offering much lower costs per token compared to many competitors. For example, DeepSeek-chat’s input cost per million tokens (cache miss) is $0.14, while DeepSeek-reasoner’s input price is $0.55 per million tokens—making it a budget-friendly choice for large-scale AI applications.
- ChatGPT-4o: Due to its extensive infrastructure, various model versions, and advanced capabilities—such as high performance in analyzing and generating images, videos, audio, and text—OpenAI puts significantly higher operational costs per token. According to OpenAI’s API pricing, GPT-4 Turbo costs $10 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens, and that’s significantly higher than DeepSeek’s rates.
After analyzing all these facts, we can see that DeepSeek and ChatGPT differ in their origin, language capabilities, architecture, language specifics, and costs.
So, rather than directly competing, these models are likely to coexist, each serving its own niche—DeepSeek as a more affordable option for practical AI use cases and ChatGPT as more premium, good for broader tasks and creative ventures.
Next, we’ll make an AI language model comparison based on features of DeepSeek R1 and ChatGPT-4o.
Feature Comparison on DeepSeek and ChatGPT
While ChatGPT is quite familiar to everyone, DeepSeek has recently become the subject of interest. In our company, we use ChatGPT-4o for our internal purposes, so we decided to test DeepSeek R1 as well. Our feature comparison will be backed by our practical experience.
1. Answers Quality and Explanations
Both AI tools are strong in this area.
| DeepSeek R1 | ChatGPT-4o |
| Primarily relies on logic and concise explanations, which sometimes may not be enough. | Great at giving detailed, well-structured responses with examples. |
When we asked the AI chatbots to explain the joke: “What do you call a guy who’s really loud? Mike”, we got the following responses:
DeepSeek gave a logical and brief response.
ChatGPT provided a quick, lively explanation, illustrating a real-life context where the joke might be used.
Both performed well, but the Chinese assistant’s reply seemed to lack a bit of clarity.
2. Reasoning Capabilities
| DeepSeek R1 | ChatGPT-4o |
| Can “think”. The R1 chatbot uses advanced reasoning techniques, including a mixture-of-experts approach, showing the logic of problem-solving to the user. | Provides deep structuring, step-by-step explanations, and broad contextual understanding. |
3. The Speed of Inputs / Outputs
| DeepSeek R1 | ChatGPT-4o |
| Responds quickly, but speed can vary depending on how busy the servers are and how complex the question is. This has also been confirmed by artificialanalysis.ai. | Reacts faster as it uses optimized processing and can adjust computing power based on the difficulty of the task. |
When testing DeepSeek, we actually had issues with both speed and responses overall. With the increased demand for the model, especially in the past week, we often failed to receive any responses at all, which was pretty frustrating (see the picture below). Hope this gets fixed soon!
4. Coding & Technical Power
| DeepSeek R1 | ChatGPT-4o |
| Offers DeepSeek-Coder, trained on 80+ programming languages with pretrained datasets of 2 trillion tokens, making it stronger in coding tasks. The model also has sophisticated knowledge in math and research. | Capable of coding assistance, debugging, and explaining programming concepts. However, DeepSeek may have an edge in efficiency and reasoning for technical tasks. |
At this point, our developers split into two teams.
One team stated that they preferred ChatGPT o1-mini because it generated full code faster, while DeepSeek only provided small code snippets, requiring additional prompting to complete the solution.
The other team said DeepSeek produced a better code.
5. Image, Audio, and Video Recognition (OCR & Multimodal AI)
| DeepSeek R1 | ChatGPT-4o |
| Limited capabilities in image, audio, and video recognition as of now, but Janus-Pro-7B (a newer model) introduces multimodal processing. | Supports image, audio, and video recognition, making it more advanced in multimodal AI. Users can analyze images, generate captions, and even process speech-based inputs. |
We tried asking DeepSeek to “read” text from images and create a cover for a blog post but with no success so far. ChatGPT absolutely nailed these tasks.
6. Creativity and Writing
| DeepSeek R1 | ChatGPT-4o |
| Writes in a more friendly style, sometimes even too much; the stories and ideas are well structured. The chatbot focuses more on factual accuracy than creativity and ideas. | Initially, it starts with a neutral style but soon catches the user’s tone. More responsive to creative writing, such as narrative, poetry, and humor. Its responses feel more emotional, human-like and engaging. |
Here are more cases from our practice. When we asked DeepSeek to translate a text from Spanish, it struggled to maintain the style, sometimes making the translation too literal. ChatGPT did the translation with only a couple of corrections needed.
When we asked both ChatGPT and DeepSeek to create assignments for better English vocabulary learning, ChatGPT did it also better.
We also noticed that when the chatbot resumes functioning after its server’s overload, it can’t remember previous requests and its own replies. As a result, we had to restart our conversation.
On the other hand, DeepSeek created LinkedIn posts with sharper humor than ChatGPT.
7. Data Privacy and Security
| DeepSeek R1 | ChatGPT-4o |
| Provides transparency but has concerns with data security rules as the company is situated in China. | Follows Western data protection standards, providing clearer privacy rules and enterprise-level security for organizations. |
Summing up all the differences in features, DeepSeek shows great potential, putting it on a similar level to ChatGPT. The AI model is strong at reasoning, high coding and technical skills, and creating content but it needs more prompts and adjustments.
However, DeepSeek still feels like work in progress due to its frequent server overloads, security issues, and short memory.
Meanwhile, ChatGPT continues to demonstrate reliability across many tasks, including creative thinking, explanatory capabilities, and multilingual processing.
If you’re curious about ChatGPT integration services for your future project or want to implement AI tools into your existing one, reach out to us for a free consultation and project estimate.
Strengths and Weaknesses of DeepSeek and ChatGPT
Here we’ll highlight the key benefits and drawbacks of the two AI technologies. Understanding them will give you more confidence in your choice.
| Aspect | DeepSeek R1 | ChatGPT-4o |
| Pros | Open-source and budget-friendly | Excellent at understanding context and generating polished text |
| Uses fewer system resources | Great for general research, detailed explanations, creating, and writing needs | |
| Quick responses for structured and factual queries | Stronger multimodal support (e.g., handling images and voice) | |
| Well-suited for coding, maths, narrow research and technical queries | More intuitive and user-friendly interface | |
| Provides consistent results across a wide range of tasks | ||
| Cons | Limited by data security and privacy regulations within a single country—China. | Requires a subscription for full-feature access |
| Needs more time for fact-checking for complex or nuanced answers | Higher resource consumption and operational costs | |
| “Forgets” the history of the current chat, including all inputs and outputs | Can be slower when handling technical calculations | |
| Shows frequent server overloads |
Which AI Model to Choose: Best Practices for Using DeepSeek and ChatGPT in Business
The most important factor you need to consider when choosing any technology for a project is your specific industry, your needs, and your business goals. After you understand them, you’ll find your best-fitting solution.
As for our AI models, DeepSeek vs. ChatGPT, it’s becoming clear that they can be used for different purposes but can coexist.
Let’s define the best use cases where each can perform most effectively.
DeepSeek Review
If your business is connected with China or you work in a highly technical sector that requires coding, data analysis, or deep research, DeepSeek might be your go-to tool. Its open-source flexibility makes it ideal for customization, and its cost-effectiveness might fit you, especially if you have a small business or a startup. However, you’ll need to double-check its outputs for complex analyses.
DeepSeek can be used in the following industries:
- Software development – great for automating coding tasks and debugging.
- Data Science & AI research – helps with data processing and algorithm development.
- Engineering & technical writing – useful for generating documentation and technical reports.
- Startups & open-source projects – cost-effective and customizable for small teams.
ChatGPT Review
If your business is connected with technical and non-technical communications, ChatGPT excels here with its sophisticated language generation and user-friendly experience. It’s great for working with people, creating any types of concepts, business strategies, and supporting marketing efforts.
On the other hand, ChatGPT is also strong in coding, debugging and data analysis. Moreover, it provides stronger international data security and privacy compliance.
ChatGPT shines in industries such as:
- Education & training — AI simplifies complex topics for students and employees.
E-learning apps such as Magoosh integrate ChatGPT for monitoring students ongoing results, personalizing the educational process, and helping teachers not to miss any gaps in students’ knowledge.
- E-commerce and customer services – artificial intelligence helps engage users, personalize communication for a better product fit, and enhance the overall customer experience.
Sephora built its virtual makeup artist using ChatGPT to engage customers in purchasing their beauty products. Users can choose products and ‘try’ them on in real time.
- Healthcare & finance – AI can be designed to comply with privacy regulations, making it safer for handling sensitive data.
Professional sports and fitness companies such as NNOXX use the ChatGPT assistant to analyze training data from wearable devices and help athletes with personalized recommendations for a healthy training process.
- Business & insurance services – AI is perfect for reports, data analysis, and client communication.
Bank of America’s AI-driven Erica has improved the bank’s services by helping its clients with financial advice, transactions, and account inquiries. This has greatly reduced wait times and improved customer satisfaction.
The Future Outlook for Both AI models
As we work closely with many AI tools, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Whisper, and more, we can make some educated predictions about where things are headed.
When it comes to the future of artificial intelligence, we are certain: with all of the buzz around DeepSeek’s debut, AI companies will work hard to improve their models, making them smarter, faster and more cost-effective.
As for DeepSeek, the Chinese developers will most likely work on strengthening its AI models by focusing on:
- Input/output speed
- Server performance optimization
- Data security enhancements
They are also expected to fix certain basic issues, such as enhancing memory retention for previous outputs within a single thread. Plus, we can anticipate from the creators additional features, such as advanced content recognition and creation.
Well, there’s a lot of work to be done. But in the end, we’ll surely get another powerful AI tool to assist technicians, scientists, educators, and many others.
Summing Up
Both ChatGPT and DeepSeek are powerful and intelligent AI tools. They aren’t direct competitors but are designed for slightly different purposes.
If you want to improve your application’s customer service, data analytics, or other related areas, ChatGPT is a great choice.
On the other hand, if your goal is to create software for manufacturing, research, or technical programming, DeepSeek—or even ChatGPT—may be a good fit. However, keep in mind that DeepSeek is a new model that may still need to be upgraded.
Choosing the right technology is a high responsibility. So, it’s best to consult an experienced development team first. We’re happy to discuss your ideas. Get in touch with us, and let’s bring your project to life together!
