San Francisco: US-based OpenAI's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT was the most popular AI tool with 4.7 billion monthly visits in January, according to the AITools website. ChatGPT maintained its lead despite facing stiff competition from new entrants in the AI market.

According to Anadolu Agency, the launch of China's DeepSeek led to a decline in ChatGPT's monthly visitor traffic. Nevertheless, ChatGPT remained at the top of AITools' list, which includes both generative AI tools and those with AI-powered features. Canva, the online graphic design application, secured the second position with 887 million monthly visits, while Google Translate followed closely with 595 million visits.

DeepSeek's introduction significantly impacted the US AI market and even affected the stock market. The R1 reasoning model, DeepSeek's competitive rival to ChatGPT's premium offering, was released as completely open-source code for free. As a result, DeepSeek experienced an astonishing increase in its number of monthly users, rising over 2,000% to reach 268 million in January. This growth marked the fastest monthly visitor increase among AI tools, while ChatGPT's user base fell by 2%.

CharacterAI ranked fifth with 226 million users, followed by JanitorAI with 200 million, Perplexity with 133 million, and Google's Gemini with 118 million monthly users. Notably, Gemini saw a decline of over 9% in January as DeepSeek gained prominence.

Other notable AI tools included Remove.bg and Claude, which had 112 million and 105 million monthly users, respectively. The evolving AI landscape underscored the intensifying competition between the US and China, with only one Chinese company making it to the top 10, while the majority were US-based tools.