In a stunning turn of events, the mobile app of Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has skyrocketed to the top of app stores globally, surpassing US-based AI chatbot ChatGPT and becoming the number one free app in the US App Store and 51 other countries. According to mobile app analytics firm Appfigures, DeepSeek's rapid rise to the top is a result of its release of a series of open AI models that are competitive with leading offerings from OpenAI and Google.

What's more remarkable is that DeepSeek claims its models were trained for a fraction of the price with significantly worse AI chips, representing new efficiency gains for AI model training. This development has sent shockwaves through the tech industry, with Nvidia's stock price tumbling down as much as 17% on Monday.

DeepSeek's mobile app has seen a meteoric rise in popularity, with downloads doubling from 1 million on Friday to 2.6 million across both the App Store and Google Play as of Monday morning. The app currently sits in the Top 10 list for free apps in 111 countries on the App Store and 18 countries on Google Play, according to Appfigures.

Analytics firm Sensor Tower reports that more than 80% of DeepSeek's total mobile app downloads have come in the past 7 days, with the app seeing nearly 300% more app downloads than Perplexity, another leading consumer AI app, in that time frame. DeepSeek moved into its No. 1 spot on the US App Store on Sunday, January 26, up from No. 31 just a couple of days prior, and is currently the No. 14 Overall free app on Google Play, rapidly climbing up from No. 133 on January 24.

The app's popularity has also led to a significant increase in daily active users, with a jump of over 110% from January 24-25 compared with the same period last week, both globally and in the US. While China is the largest mobile app market for DeepSeek today, it only represents 23% of its total downloads, with the US and Egypt making up 15% and 6% of its total downloads, respectively.

The sudden rise of DeepSeek raises questions about the dominance of popular consumer AI apps, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. While hundreds of millions of people use these apps every month, DeepSeek's success proves that the consumer AI space is still volatile, and new competitors shouldn't be counted out.

It's worth noting that reaching the No. 1 position on the App Store isn't just calculated by app downloads alone. Apple's algorithm takes into account numerous factors, including velocity of installs, which allows apps that gain installs quickly to skyrocket to the top of the charts, overtaking others that may have a larger total number of users or installs. It will be more telling to see how long DeepSeek holds its top position over time.

The tech industry is still grappling with the implications of DeepSeek's AI model training techniques and what it means for the broader AI space. Leading AI model providers may be feeling pressured to release better models to prove their dominance, or justify the hefty price they're paying for compute. Meta has reportedly created several "war rooms" to analyze DeepSeek's training methods.

DeepSeek's rise in popularity was potentially stifled by "large-scale malicious" attacks, the company reported on Monday, which forced it to limit customers outside of China from registering for the app. Despite this, the app's success is a significant development in the AI space, and its implications will be closely watched in the coming weeks and months.