It's not and it hasn't surpassed GPT. A lot of that is headline hype.

They literally used GPT and Llama to help build DeekSeek, it responds thinking that it's GPT in countless queries (which people have been posting screenshots of). They 'cheated' exactly as Musk did to build xAI's model/s. So much of this is laughable scaremongering and it's absolutely not an accomplishment of large consequence.

It's a synth LLM.

Though it is still a fascinating result that shows that the giant frontier models could be made much more efficient, and how to do so.