There's a DeepSeek phone coming soon, and it's not from Samsung or any other obvious brand

The DeepSeek AI system is coming to smartphones this month – but it's not from any of the usual smartphone suspects.

The first DeepSeek R1 phone will be made by Infinix instead, which is adding integration into its Folax voice assistant. Folax is already AI-powered, but currently uses ChatGPT.

Infinix's internal testing is claimed to have produced interesting results – the company told T3 that the DeepSeek version of Folax is "noticeably faster" when it comes to understanding requests. Its "show your working" approach to solving problems has also proved popular in testing – it enables you to see how the app reaches its conclusions.

An official announcement is expected on 26 February 2025, ahead of Mobile World Congress. But it won't be the last, because DeepSeek is causing a lot of excitement.

It was the most popular free app in the US in January 2025 – and AI is considered a key selling point by many phone makers.

What's so great about a DeepSeek phone?

Although DeepSeek is a ChatGPT-style large language model (LLM), it does things slightly differently. It uses what's called a "mixture of experts" (MOE) model, which can be much faster and considerably more efficient than ChatGPT and similar systems.

To simplify it a little bit, imagine that ChatGPT and DeepSeek have access to millions of experts in every conceivable field. When you query ChatGPT, it sends the query to all of them. But when you query DeepSeek, it only asks the relevant experts.

That makes it potentially much more efficient in terms of time and energy, so it's claimed to be quicker and less likely to cook the planet with its energy demands.

There's another big advantage of DeepSeek, and that's price. ChatGPT is freemium, so the core product is free but the best bits are kept for paying customers. DeepSeek is completely free.

You don't even need to wait for Infinix to launch its new voice assistant to try DeepSeek for yourself. You can find the app on the Google Play Store here and on the Apple App Store here.

It's not all sunshine and flowers, however. DeepSeek comes from China, allegedly censors content the Chinese government doesn't approve of, and is said to take the Chinese government line on some political and human rights issues.

There are also some privacy concerns, so much so that the app has been banned in South Korea. So you might want to give it a miss if you're working with sensitive data.