Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's chatbot achieved only 17% accuracy in delivering news and information in a NewsGuard audit that ranked it tenth out of eleven in a comparison with its Western competitors including OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google Gemini.
The chatbot repeated false claims 30% of the time and gave vague or not useful answers 53% of the time in response to news-related prompts, resulting in an 83% fail rate, according to a report published by trustworthiness rating service NewsGuard on Wednesday.
That was worse than an average fail rate of 62% for its Western rivals and raises doubts about AI technology that DeepSeek has claimed performs on par or better than Microsoft-backed OpenAI at a fraction of the cost.
Within days of its roll-out, DeepSeek's chatbot became the most downloaded app in Apple's AAPL.O App Store, stirring concerns about United States' lead in AI and sparking a market rout that wiped around $1 trillion off U.S. technology stocks.
The Chinese startup did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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