DeepSeek is a leading Chinese artificial intelligence research firm based in Hangzhou. Backed by High-Flyer Quant, DeepSeek shocked the global tech community by releasing foundation models that match or exceed the performance of OpenAI's GPT-4 and Anthropic's Claude in key reasoning and coding benchmarks, but at a fraction of the cost.
Its flagship model, DeepSeek-R1, uses advanced reinforcement learning to perform multi-step "reasoning" (similar to OpenAI's o1 series), showing its full chain of thought while arriving at an answer. DeepSeek's API pricing is disruptively cheap, running at up to 95% cheaper than Western frontier models, which has led to massive adoption among global developers and startups.
DeepSeek is fully open-weights, meaning its model architectures and parameters are publicly accessible under open licenses, allowing organizations to self-host and customize the models on their own local servers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Is DeepSeek free to use?
Yes, DeepSeek offers a free web chat interface and mobile app. For developers, its API is pay-as-you-go and is currently the most cost-efficient frontier API on the market.
Q: Where is DeepSeek hosted?
DeepSeek is hosted on infrastructure based in China, but it is accessible globally through its web platform and API endpoints.
Q: Does DeepSeek support code generation?
Yes, the DeepSeek-Coder family is widely considered one of the top open-source coding assistants in the world, matching the capabilities of dedicated programming tools.
Key Features
✓ Reinforcement Reasoning
DeepSeek-R1 provides a visible, multi-step chain-of-thought to solve complex logic.