DeepSeek’s growth in China surges past ByteDance’s Doubao in AI app race

DeepSeek had 22.2 million daily active users in January, surpassing Doubao’s 17 million, but it still trails the TikTok owner in monthly users

Reading Time:2 minutes

Since DeepSeek released an app for iOS and Android in early January, the AI assistant has surged in popularity. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 5:00pm, 6 Feb 2025

The chatbot app from artificial intelligence (AI) sensation DeepSeek has overtaken Doubao, the equivalent product from TikTok parent ByteDance, as China’s most popular AI app, reflecting the continuing widespread interest in the Hangzhou-based start-up.

Since DeepSeek’s open-source V3 and R1 models sent shock waves through Silicon Valley and Wall Street last month, the start-up has also been making waves back home as domestic graphics processing unit (GPU) makers, cloud service providers, businesses and consumers all rush to embrace it.

The company’s namesake DeepSeek AI assistant, offered as a free app to consumers, had an average of 22.2 million daily active users (DAUs) in January, surpassing Doubao’s 17 million DAUs in the same period, according to the latest data compiled by Aicpb.com, a website that tracks the popularity of global AI services.

It also surpassed OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the world’s fastest-growing AI app in terms of DAU growth, crossing 21 million DAUs within three weeks of its public release for Android on January 8 and iOS on January 10, Aicpb.com data shows. ChatGPT, the first product to raise widespread awareness of generative AI, had 1.46 million DAUs 20 days after its release at the end of 2022.

DeepSeek’s chatbot gained popularity after the company introduced its R1 reasoning model last month. The model matched or surpassed OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model in certain benchmark tests. Like V3, R1 is free to use in the DeepSeek app, while OpenAI’s o1 required users to subscribe to a US$20-per-month service for limited access when it first launched.

As everyone from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to US President Donald Trump took notice of DeepSeek, the start-up’s profile rose significantly at home during the week-long Lunar New Year holiday.