DeepSeek

DeepSeek is an AI company based in Hangzhou, China, founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng and funded by High-Flyer, the quantitative investment fund he co-founded. It builds large language models, offers them in a free chat app and sells access to them through an API at low prices.

It drew worldwide attention in January 2025 with DeepSeek-R1, a reasoning model that thinks step by step before answering, built on top of its earlier model DeepSeek-V3. R1 performed close to the best models from American labs on many tests, but DeepSeek published its weights under a permissive license, so anyone could download it and run it, together with technical reports explaining how it was trained. The reports also described tricks to train efficiently, such as a mixture of experts design and using reinforcement learning to teach reasoning, and a training cost far lower than people expected, although that figure covered only the final training run.

Its arrival mattered for several reasons. It suggested that strong models did not require the biggest budgets, it came from China despite US limits on exports of the most advanced AI chips, and it gave researchers everywhere an open model to study and adapt. It also raised concerns: the app stores data on servers in China, some governments banned it on official devices, and its hosted service avoids or follows official lines on topics that are sensitive in China.