DeepSeek

DeepSeek is a Chinese startup founded in July 2023 in Hangzhou by Liang Wenfeng and backed by hedge fund High‑Flyer. It is developing advanced open‑source large language models (LLMs), most notably DeepSeek‑R1, released in early 2025 under an MIT license. The R1 and V3 series follow a Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) architecture and chain‑of‑thought reasoning, offering high performance in domains like math, programming, and diagnostics while using significantly less compute—training costs totaling around US $5‑6 million, roughly a tenth of what competitors like GPT‑4 cost. DeepSeek launched a free web and mobile chatbot powered by R1 on January 10, 2025. Within weeks it surpassed ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app in the U.S. App Store—sparking a global “AI space race” and even triggering sharp stock declines for major tech companies.