In early 2025, the tech world was thrown into a whirlwind with the announcement of DeepSeek, an AI assistant developed by a Chinese startup designed to rival ChatGPT. DeepSeek’s LLM, DeepSeek-V3, generated serious industry buzz by creating a product that can hold its own — and, according to some, even surpasses — ChatGPT at a small fraction of OpenAI’s investment in training their models.

The upset caused by DeepSeek’s emergence onto the scene was enough to cause Nvidia’s stock to plummet literally overnight. The fact that their stock still hasn’t recovered is a sign the industry is paying attention to DeepSeek and its potential implications for the AI industry.

Is DeepSeek the disruptor the industry’s making it out to be? Or is it just more hype? To find out, we’ve compiled a detailed comparison of ChatGPT, using the GPT-4.0 Model, versus DeepSeek-V3 to let you know which tech will best serve your needs.

ChatGPT Vs. DeepSeek: A Side-By-Side Comparison

To start, let’s begin with the basics. At this point, most publicly available LLMs aren’t that different from one another — especially on the free level. Virtually every LLM can write an email, an article, or summarize text. Every LLM can perform some form of creative writing or troubleshoot code. Yet, each also has a tendency to make things up when it doesn’t know something, unfortunately, which is known as a hallucination.

All that being said, there are still differences between ChatGPT and DeepSeek. For instance, ChatGPT is designed to fulfill specialized tasks in addition to its conversational abilities. DeepSeek is more of a generalist application at the moment, but it’s intended to ultimately help realize artificial general intelligence (AGI).

ChatGPT is trained on data up to June 2024, while DeepSeek is trained on data from July 2024. However, ChatGPT can also consult the internet to retrieve up-to-date information. DeepSeek doesn’t even try. Finally, and most importantly for most general AI users, DeepSeek is still completely free.

Now that that’s all out of the way let’s compare ChatGPT Vs. DeepSeek by looking at some specific parameters, which should help give you an even better idea of which LLM to use.

ChatGPT Vs. DeepSeek: Model Architecture

Even though DeepSeek and ChatGPT return very similar results, each LLM has something very different going on under the hood. DeepSeek uses a mixture of experts (MoE) approach, which operates like a panel of experts where only the most relevant are invoked for each query. This makes DeepSeek more efficient, as each query only requires a small percentage of its 671 billion parameters to be queried.

In contrast, ChatGPT uses a transformer model, which might make ChatGPT slightly more consistent but at the expense of efficiency.

ChatGPT Vs. DeepSeek: Strengths

With DeepSeek being geared more towards specialization, it’s little surprise that it performs slightly better regarding technical tasks. The Chinese LLM displays a truly impressive aptitude for math, being able to correctly perform Calculus problems with no additional prompting. This is particularly true for specific models, as mentioned in DeepSeek vs. ChatGPT: A Comparative Study for Scientific Computing and Scientific Machine Learning Tasks¹, which observes that “results show that reasoning-optimized models, DeepSeek R1 and ChatGPT o3-mini-high, consistently performed better in recognizing the nature of the problem and making their decisions accordingly.”

That said, ChatGPT is slightly better at understanding context and providing nuanced answers to a wider range of topics.

ChatGPT Vs. DeepSeek: Accessibility

As we said in the introduction, the main difference between DeepSeek and ChatGPT is that DeepSeek is still completely free. ChatGPT works on a freemium model, on the other hand, where you only get a certain amount of requests before you’re downgraded to a lesser model. This raises the likelihood of you being interrupted in the middle of a ChatGPT session, which can be highly inconvenient as well as irritating.

ChatGPT Vs. DeepSeek: Ease-Of-Use and Customizability

ChatGPT’s been around longer and is designed for a more general audience, so it’s a bit slicker and easier to use. DeepSeek is slightly more able to be customized, however, but it does take a bit more technical know-how.

ChatGPT Vs. DeepSeek: Writing Style

Due to its more generalized nature and greater context, ChatGPT is slightly better at producing more conversational language with a greater understanding of context. With its more specialized training data, DeepSeek is a little better at producing technical writing and content.

ChatGPT Vs. DeepSeek: Coding Assistance

This is one area where ChatGPT’s head start makes a big difference. ChatGPT is better at explaining all the changes it makes to your code, making it useful for learning how to code. The newest version of ChatGPT even lets you run the code directly in the chat, so you don’t even need to open a separate terminal.

DeepSeek cuts to the chase, on the other hand. It just makes the changes rather than showing its work. This makes it slightly faster and more efficient, but a little worse for teaching how to code.

ChatGPT Vs. DeepSeek: Creativity

ChatGPT is slightly better at delivering more diverse solutions, helping you to consider several alternatives to arrive at the right solution. DeepSeek offers fewer solutions but explains its rationale more thoroughly, making it slightly superior if you already have an idea about your solution.

ChatGPT Vs. DeepSeek: Research

ChatGPT is adept at breaking down concepts into understandable pieces, due to its intended general usage. It can also access the internet to check facts, so it can return data more recent than July 2024. DeepSeek is faster and more concise, however, making it slightly better if you’re fact-checking projects containing data before July 2024.

ChatGPT Vs. DeepSeek: Bias

One of the most common and severe criticisms of DeepSeek is its Chinese origin. The Chinese government is heavily involved with the private sector, meaning that individual businesses aren’t as able to create products that critique or undermine the Chinese government. This tendency has been codified with DeepSeek, where researchers have found Chinese propaganda being disseminated by the LLM.

When we tried it, DeepSeek displayed a reluctance to return any answers that might be critical of the Chinese government, while ChatGPT had no such qualms. So, if your work requires bias-free responses, you’re better off using ChatGPT than DeepSeek.

That said, LLMs are only as good as the data they’re trained on. With ChatGPT being trained on American data, particularly from social media, it may have some of the same biases as the data it’s trained on. Researchers found evidence of slight racial bias in ChatGPT last year despite the restrictions around sensitive content and hate speech. The current models don’t seem to be exhibiting the same behavior, but keep your eyes out for harmful language or inaccuracies if you’re using ChatGPT.

ChatGPT Vs. DeepSeek: Final Thoughts

As we’ve seen, ChatGPT and DeepSeek can seem almost identical if you only consider their output. Outputted texts from both LLMs are 74.2% identical, after all. However, both LLMs are quite different beneath the surface, making each one better for specific use cases.

Generally speaking, if you’re looking for conversational language, creativity, or a slightly slicker interface, you might go with ChatGPT. If you’re looking for technical writing that is completely free with the potential to become AGI at some point, you might try DeepSeek.