What happens when two of the hottest generative AI apps take a stab at reviewing each other?
We decided to find out—and the results might just surprise you.
We gave both AI models the exact same prompt (“Draft a pros and cons review of____ and limit the word count to 400 words.”) and here’s what each had to say
ChatGPT reviews DeepSeek
DeepSeek review: Pros and cons
DeepSeek is an open-source large language model (LLM) developed by DeepSeek AI, positioned as a powerful alternative to established models like GPT-3.5/4 and LLaMA. With a focus on bilingual (Chinese-English) capabilities and coding tasks, DeepSeek has quickly garnered attention among developers, researchers, and AI enthusiasts. Here’s a concise review of its strengths and weaknesses:
Pros
- Open-source and accessible
DeepSeek is available under a relatively permissive license, allowing developers to integrate it into projects without the constraints of proprietary models. This fosters transparency, experimentation, and academic research.
- Strong coding capabilities
DeepSeek-LLM and DeepSeek-Coder are both optimized for programming tasks. The model performs competitively in code generation, problem-solving, and debugging—on par with or better than GPT-3.5 in many benchmarks.
- Competitive performance
DeepSeek achieves strong results in standard LLM benchmarks, including MMLU and HumanEval. It supports reasoning, language understanding, and math tasks with minimal hallucination, especially in structured queries.
- Bilingual strength
With robust support for both English and Chinese, DeepSeek is particularly useful for users in multilingual environments or cross-cultural applications.
- Efficiency and scalability
DeepSeek offers variants ranging from 1.3B to 67B parameters, allowing users to choose models suitable for their computing capacity. Its quantized versions also enable more efficient deployment on consumer-grade GPUs.
Cons
- Limited instruction tuning
While powerful, DeepSeek is not as finely instruction-tuned as GPT-4 or Claude. It may require more prompt engineering or struggle with nuanced human-like interaction or emotional tone.
- Inferior Chat UX (out of the box)
Unlike OpenAI or Anthropic models with polished chat interfaces and API ecosystems, DeepSeek requires more setup and lacks turnkey user-facing tools, making it less beginner-friendly.
- Weaker in multimodal support
DeepSeek is primarily a text and code model. As of now, it lacks the multimodal (image, audio, video) capabilities that other frontier models like GPT-4o or Gemini offer.
- Community and ecosystem still growing
Though gaining traction, DeepSeek’s community, documentation, and third-party tool support are still in development compared to more established LLMs.
Verdict:
DeepSeek is a promising, high-performing open-source LLM—particularly strong for developers and researchers seeking a customizable alternative to proprietary models. Its main tradeoffs lie in user-friendliness and general-purpose instruction fluency.
DeepSeek’s take on ChatGPT
ChatGPT: Pros and cons
Pros
Versatility: Handles diverse tasks – writing, coding, brainstorming, summarizing, translation, tutoring – acting as a multi-tool assistant.
Efficiency and speed: Generates content, answers, and ideas rapidly, significantly boosting productivity for drafts, research, and repetitive tasks.
24/7 availability: Always accessible for instant help, unlike human counterparts.
Scalability: Can assist countless users simultaneously, ideal for basic customer service or information dissemination.
Creative spark: Useful for overcoming writer’s block, generating ideas, and exploring different perspectives or writing styles.
Multilingual support: Communicates and translates across numerous languages effectively.
Cons
Accuracy and hallucinations: Prone to generating plausible-sounding but incorrect, biased, or entirely fabricated (“hallucinated”) information. Critical fact-checking is essential.
Limited understanding: Lacks true comprehension, reasoning, or real-world experience. Responses can be shallow, generic, or miss nuance and context.
Knowledge cutoff: Trained on data only up to a specific point (e.g., July 2024 for GPT-4), lacking awareness of recent events, trends, or information.
Potential bias: Reflects and can amplify biases present in its vast training data, leading to skewed or unfair outputs.
Lack of critical judgment: Cannot reliably evaluate the truthfulness, ethics, or quality of its own responses or external sources.
Generic output. Can produce formulaic, unoriginal, or overly verbose content lacking a distinct human voice or deep insight.
Security/Privacy: Raises concerns about input data handling, confidentiality, and potential misuse.
Conclusion
ChatGPT is a powerful productivity and creativity tool best suited for drafting, ideation, and simple tasks where human oversight is present. Its key strengths are speed, versatility, and availability.
However, its critical weaknesses are unreliability, potential for misinformation, lack of deep understanding, and bias. Its value depends entirely on the user’s awareness of these limitations and their diligence in verifying outputs. It’s an impressive assistant, not a replacement for human judgment or expertise.
