DeepSeek's Exponential Growth, and the Blueprint for AI’s Next Era

How a Simple UX Breakthrough Unlocked #1 in the iOS App Store and Redefined Reasoning, Infrastructure, and the Business of AI

DeepSeek and the Arrival of AI 2.0

DeepSeek’s meteoric rise to the #1 spot in the App Store over the last couple days felt like it happened overnight. The app is at #1 in 51 countries and has hit 1 million downloads in both iOS and the Google Play—yet if we look closer, its success has been years in the making. Sam may tweet that it’s refreshing to see the competition, but the internal vibe in Silicon Valley is decidedly darker.

The Axios article is here

But all this hand-wringing is not stopping people from using it—even devs who you might think would be more cautious giving DeepSeek’s aggressive terms of use. Low token costs are driving spiking usage on HuggingFace.