DeepSeek

Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd., doing business as DeepSeek, is a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company that develops large language models (LLMs). Based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, DeepSeek is owned and funded by High-Flyer, a Chinese hedge fund. DeepSeek was founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, who serves as the CEO for both of the companies. The company launched an eponymous chatbot alongside its DeepSeek-R1 model in January 2025.

DeepSeek-R1 provided responses comparable to other contemporary LLMs, such as OpenAI's GPT-4 and o1. Its training cost was reported to be lower than other LLMs. The company claims that it trained V3 for US$6 million, which was less than OpenAI's reported US$100 million cost for GPT-4 in 2023. DeepSeek also claimed that they were using approximately one-tenth the computing power consumed by Meta's comparable model, Llama 3.1. DeepSeek's success against larger and more established rivals has been described as "upending AI".

DeepSeek's models are open-weight, meaning that the exact parameters are openly shared, but the training data is not openly licensed. Since the January 2025 debut of DeepSeek-R1, the company has made its new models available under free and open-source software licenses, like the MIT License. The company reportedly recruits AI researchers from top Chinese universities and hires from outside traditional computer science fields to broaden its models' knowledge and capabilities.

DeepSeek significantly reduced training expenses for their R1 model by incorporating techniques such as Mixture of experts (MoE). The company also trained its models during ongoing trade restrictions on AI chip exports to China. DeepSeek used weaker AI chips intended for export and employed fewer units overall. Observers like the New York Post and The Guardian have said that this breakthrough sent shock waves through the industry which were described as triggering a Sputnik moment for the US in the field of artificial intelligence, particularly due to its open-weight, cost-effective, and high-performing AI models. This threatened AI hardware leaders such as Nvidia. Its share price dropped sharply, losing US$600 billion in market value, the largest single-company decline in US stock market history.