HONG KONG (AP) — DeepSeek, the Chinese tech startup that rivals OpenAI's ChatGPT, has been gaining ground in many developing nations in a trend that could narrow the gap of artificial intelligence adoption with advanced economies, a new report suggested. In the Thursday report, researchers from Microsoft said global adoption of generative AI tools reached 16.3% of the world’s population in the three months to December, up from 15.1% in the previous three months. Yet the divide of AI adoption in developed and developing countries is widening, the report noted, with AI adoption across what Microsoft characterizes as the global north growing nearly twice as fast as in the global south.