I Asked DeepSeek and ChatGPT for Retirement and Investing Advice

• DeepSeek’s R1 chatbot is the hottest new thing in the market and Apple’s App Store.
• I decided to see how DeepSeek’s low-cost AI model compares to ChatGPT in giving financial advice.
• While the chatbots differed in some aspects, I found the performance pretty comparable.

A few weeks ago, I asked ChatGPT for its 2025 market predictions.

Then, just last week, the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek released its newest R1 model, which turns out to be cheaper and more compute-efficient than OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

I was curious to see if a competitor could deliver similar results from the same queries at a fraction of the cost and GPUs. I figured if DeepSeek’s debut was impactful enough to wipe out over a trillion dollars in stock market value, including $589 billion of Nvidia’s market cap, it probably has a pretty powerful product. So I asked DeepSeek and ChatGPT some of the same common personal finance questions.

ChatGPT debuted right as I finished college, meaning I narrowly missed being born in the generation using AI to cheat on — erm, I mean assist with — homework.

I was also probably born too early to experience a fully automated, robot-controlled society. But I was born just in time to ask two rival chatbots to give me some financial advice.

Here’s how it went.