As if launching a new AI model that shook the entire industry wasn't enough, the Chinese startup DeepSeek followed up this week by releasing an AI image generator it claims provides "significant advancements in both multimodal understanding and text-to-image instruction-following capabilities."The new image-generation model is called Janus-Pro, and it aims to compete with US rivals likeDALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion. The new model claims to outperform its competition in areas such as image quality and accuracy.The launch of Janus-Pro came only days after the release of DeepSeek's R1 model, which made waves with its lightning-fast, highly logical responses, and for being trained more quickly and at a fraction of the cost of US models.DeepSeek's model reportedly runs on less advanced Nvidia chips, raising questions about how China is competing without access to cutting-edge US technology. The iOS app has outpaced ChatGPT in downloads on the Apple App Store recently, and is still the No. 1 free app as of Jan. 31.The back-to-back releases signal China's push to gain footing in the growing AI arms race. Meanwhile, last week, President Donald Trump announced a new AI infrastructure initiative, pledging up to $500 million in partnership with OpenAI and other tech firms. Watch this: What Is DeepSeek AI? Everything to Know About the Popular New AI 01:25 The release of R1 and Janus-Pro also coincides with increased scrutiny of Chinese tech companies, with tensions already high over TikTok's data privacy concerns.In an introduction on its download page, DeepSeek says: "Janus-Pro surpasses its previous unified model and matches or exceeds the performance of task-specific models. The simplicity, high flexibility, and effectiveness of Janus-Pro make it a strong candidate for next-generation unified multimodal models."The model ranges in size from 1 billion to 7 billion parameters, a key factor in its problem-solving capabilities.The company calls Janus-Pro a "novel autoregressive framework" that solves previous challenges by separating the steps for analyzing and generating images, while still using a single, unified system to process everything."The decoupling not only alleviates the conflict between the visual encoder's roles in understanding and generation but also enhances the framework's flexibility," DeepSeek wrote.User response to Janus-Pro has been mixed so far, with some Redditors claiming the images resemble its competitors' efforts from years past. To get a sense of how Janus-Pro compares to other AI image generators, check out this breakdown of performance between ChatGPT 4o, Qwen 2.5 and Janus-Pro from YouTuber EJack Yao.Janus-Pro is currentlyavailable to downloadon the AI developer platform Hugging Face.