Why DeepSeek is different, in three charts

DeepSeek, until recently a little-known Chinese artificial intelligence company, has made itself the talk of the tech industry after it rolled out a series of large language models that outshone many of the world’s top AI developers.

DeepSeek released its buzziest large language model, R1, on Jan. 20. The AI assistant hit No. 1 on the Apple App Store in recent days, bumping OpenAI’s long-dominant ChatGPT down to No. 2.

Its sudden dominance — and its ability to outperform top U.S. models…