Chinese firm DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence chatbot has soared to the top of the Apple Store’s download charts, stunning industry insiders and analysts with its ability to match its US competitors.

The program has shaken up the tech industry and hit US titans including Nvidia and Meta, which has spent vast sums of cash to get ahead in the fast-developing AI sector.

DeepSeek was developed by a start-up based in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, known for its high density of tech firms.

Available as an app or on desktop, DeepSeek can do many of the things that its Western competitors can do — write song lyrics, help work on a personal development plan, or even write a recipe for dinner based on what’s in the fridge.

It can communicate in multiple languages, though it told AFP that it was strongest in English and Chinese.

It is subject to many of the limitations seen in other Chinese-made chatbots like Baidu’s Ernie Bot — asked about leader Xi Jinping or Beijing’s policies in the western region of Xinjiang, it implored AFP to “talk about something else.”

But from writing complex code to solving difficult sums, industry insiders have been astonished by just how well DeepSeek’s abilities match the competition.

“What we’ve found is that DeepSeek... is the top performing, or roughly on par with the best American models,” Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, told CNBC.

That’s all the more surprising given what is known about how it was made.

In a paper detailing its development, the firm said the model was trained using only a fraction of the chips used by its Western competitors.

Analysts had long thought that the United States’ critical advantage over China when it comes to producing high-powered chips — and its ability to prevent the Asian power from accessing the technology — would give it the edge in the AI race.

But DeepSeek said they spent only $5.6 million developing their model — peanuts when compared with the billions US tech giants have poured into AI.

Shares in major tech firms in the US and Japan have tumbled as the industry takes stock of the challenge from DeepSeek.