China has launched two AI chatbots similar to ChatGPT in two days. One of them is from DeepSeek and the other is Qwen 2.5 from Alibaba. Both companies claim that their chatbots are better than Open AI’s ChatGPT and all other Chatbots available across the globe.

But is this true? Let us find out all about the new Chinese AI Chatbots and how they function as compared to ChatGPT.

Open AI’s ChatGPT was launched in November 2022 and shocked the world. Ever since many tech companies have been trying to develop their own AI bots across the world. You may have heard of some of them like Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, X(Twitter) Grok, etc among the more popular ones. And there are hundreds of others that remain unknown. It has always been ChatGPT as the most widely used, overshadowing other AI chatbots.

However, a strange incident took place recently (Something like a scene out of a drama movie) that brought into light a Chinese AI chatbot by the name of DeepSeek to everyone’s lips. All famous tech personalities began commenting on it via social media platforms.

This happened because the ChatGPT server faced an outage last week and while people were searching for an alternative, the Chinese DeepSeek Chatbot finally gained the recognition it had been seeking for a couple of years. And it seems like the drama is still going on, for today, the Chinese E-Commerce giant Alibaba announced Qwen 2.5 as a better alternative to all AI chatbots including DeepSeek.

We, at Tweak Library, do not fall for claims made by anyone but rather analyze the information available and test the product for ourselves. Without further ado, let us examine DeepSeek and Qwen 2.5 and compare them to the best chatbot we know of – Open AI’s ChatGPT.

What Is DeepSeek?

DeepSeek is a free Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) Chatbot that answers any question asked of it. It is similar to  Open AI’s ChatGPT and consists of an open-source LLM (Large Language Model) that is trained at a very low cost as compared to its rivals like ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. This AI chatbot was developed by a tech company based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China, and is owned by Liang Wenfeng.

DeepSeek – A Chinese Chatbot Built on Economical Resources.

DeepSeek became the most downloaded free app in the United States after the outage issue of ChatGPT servers. BBC reports that this event shook the very foundation of US-based AI Tech firms like Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft, etc, and brought a massive downfall in their shares.

Experts claim that the chipmaker NVIDIA’s shares devalued by at least $600 Billion in market value. This happened because DeepSeek shattered the common belief that AI chatbots could only be created by American tech firms – using resources worth billions of dollars.

The DeepSeek Company is a year-old startup that has created DeepSeek R1 at a fraction of the cost of US-based AI chatbots. It is a Hangzhou-based AI research lab founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng.

The company claims to have developed this open-source AI model for less than $6 million and without the help of high-power AI chips that have been restricted from being supplied to China by the United States.

DeepSeek is free to use and requires fewer resources to function. It includes DeepSeek V3, a 671 billion parameter, a ‘mixture of experts’ model, and DeepSeek R1 which is an advanced reasoning model that uses AI.

The R1 code has an MIT license which means anyone can download it, change the architecture, integrate it into existing systems, and use it for commercial purposes without having to pay any sort of fee.

Read Also: ChatGPT Search vs Google Search: Which One To Pick For Your Searches?

What Is Qwen 2.5?

Qwen 2.5 is also a large language model (AI) developed by China’s E-commerce giant, Alibaba. It can help users generate text content for articles, and stories, answer logical and mathematical questions, etc within seconds, using Artificial Intelligence.

It provides human-like answers to almost all questions asked of it except in the field of Politics, Illegal activities, Hate or Discriminatory Content, and Medical, Legal, and Financial advice.

Qwen 2.5 – Another Chinese Chatbot By E-commerce Giant – Alibaba

There is fierce competition from DeepSeek’s own country, China, and it is called Qwen 2.5 Chatbot created by E-commerce giant – Alibaba. This chatbot was released on the Lunar New Year (Jan 29, 2025) and is creating waves already.

It was already bad news for US-based AI companies with the launch of DeepSeek a few weeks ago. And the launch of another chatbot from China has worsened the situation even further.

A Small Comparison Between DeepSeek VS Qwen 2.5 VS ChatGPT.

There is not much information available about Qwen 2.5 and DeepSeek as of now. We have highlighted a few points based on Performance, Efficiency, and Cost.

Performance. Experts suggest that the DeepSeek R1 model has proven to be better than ChatGPT and Gwen 2.5 in many scenarios.

Efficiency. The makers of DeepSeek have claimed that this AI chatbot was developed and trained on a fraction of the resources that were used to train ChatGPT, Gemini, Llama, etc. This proves it is resource-efficient. On the other hand, it is now about the resources used for Qwen 2.5 but it can handle complex tasks and long conversations with a focus on efficiency and scalability.

Cost Factor. DeepSeek and Qwen are multi-million projects whereas Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are multi-billion projects. This proves that AI chatbots from China are quite cost-efficient. With low costs, these AI chatbots will be the first choice for new startups and other developers looking for a less expensive model.

Read Also: ChatGPT vs Grok AI | The battle of AI language models

Practical Differences Between Responses.

Question 1- Look at this series: 12, 11, 13, 12, 14, 13, … What number should come next?

Answer: 15.

ChatGPT – Took 4 seconds, analyzing and observing the pattern to deduce the answers.

DeepSeek – Took more than 5 seconds as the steps were longer than ChatGPT.

Qwen 2.5 – Took 3 seconds and fewer steps to arrive at the solution.

Winner – Qwen 2.5

Question 2 – Create a short story on animals talking with humans.

ChatGPT –  Took 3 seconds and created a story titled The Day Animals Spoke with 190 words

DeepSeek – Took 8 seconds and created a story titled The Whispering Woods with 550 words.

Qwen 2.5 –  Took 12 seconds and created a story titled The Whispering Grove with 570 words.

Winner – ChatGPT (it did create a short story of around 200 words)

Please note – All three chatbots created the same story of a girl going to deep woods where she finds that animals can talk. This did freak me out a bit.

Question 3 – Translate the following phrase into Spanish “Kill Two Birds With One Stone”.

ChatGPT – Took more time than DeepSeek.

DeepSeek – The quickest one to answer with the correct explanation.

Qwen 2.5 – Took the longest time of all three apps.

Winner – DeepSeek

Read Also: Google Gemini vs OpenAI ChatGPT: A Comparison of Two AI Chatbots

Which One Will You Use?

After DeepSeek and Qwen, there has been a surge of rising AI chatbots from different companies across the globe. There are rumors of Tiktok’s owner, ByteDance, releasing its own AI model. It is too early to determine and announce a winner.

Each AI chatbot has been designed by a different team, making all chatbots unique. Another reason that we cannot decide on a winner is due to the fact that these AI chatbots are still being trained and constantly evolving.

The future would consist of a few different AI chatbots that are the best of the rest. And it would be left to the people to decide which chatbot suits their needs the most.