DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company that has quickly gained recognition for its advancements in large language models (LLMs). Founded in 2023 and based in Hangzhou, DeepSeek is dedicated to developing AI models that aim to push the limits of artificial general intelligence (AGI). The company emphasizes efficiency, accessibility, and open-source innovation, positioning itself as a strong competitor to leading AI firms such as OpenAI and Google DeepMind.
DeepSeek was founded in 2023 in Hangzhou, China, by Liang Wenfeng with the aim of advancing artificial general intelligence (AGI). The company focuses on making AI models more efficient, accessible, and open-source. Despite being new to the AI field, DeepSeek quickly established itself as a strong competitor to major players like OpenAI and Google DeepMind.
The company’s journey began in November 2023 with the launch of Deepseek Coder, a model designed to assist software developers with coding tasks. Unlike many proprietary solutions, Deepseek Coder was released under the MIT open-source license, which helped attract a vibrant developer community.
Building on this success, Deepseek introduced its first large language models (LLMs) in January 2025. These models included Deepseek LLM, available in two versions with 7 billion and 67 billion parameters. They were trained on 2 trillion tokens in both English and Chinese and demonstrated performance on par with leading AI models while remaining cost-effective.
A major breakthrough came with Deepseek r1, a reasoning-focused AI model aimed at tackling complex tasks like mathematics and programming. This model used a "mixture of experts" approach, activating only the necessary computing resources for each task. This innovation significantly enhanced efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and its release in early 2025 caused noticeable shifts in the AI industry.
DeepSeek’s rapid progress highlights its commitment to open-source innovation and the development of AGI. With each new release, the company continues to push boundaries, democratizing AI technology and reshaping the global AI landscape.
Deepseek was founded to address several key challenges in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and large-scale language models (LLMs). One of the main issues was the heavy computational cost to train and deploy AI models. Leading AI models offered by companies such as OpenAI and Google DeepMind require huge amounts of computational power, making them expensive and difficult to obtain. Deepseek's goal was to develop cost-effective AI models that could achieve state-of-the-art performance without excessive resource consumption.
Another major issue was that many advanced AI models are closed-source. Deepseek wanted to promote open-source AI and enable developers and researchers around the world to access, modify, and improve models. DeepSeek wanted to accelerate innovation by making AI more transparent and collaborative.
The company also focused on improving thinking skills in AI, especially in mathematics and coding. By leveraging a "combination of experts," DeepSeek was able to significantly improve efficiency while maintaining high performance and reshape its AI environment.
Deepseek has established itself as a strong player in the AI industry, and its future development is expected to be shaped by several key factors. Given the rapid advances in large-scale language models (LLMs) and cost-effective AI training, Deepseek will likely continue to challenge established AI leaders such as OpenAI and Google DeepMind.
Deepseek's "mix of experts" approach has already demonstrated that it can reduce computational costs while maintaining high performance. Future iterations of the Deepseek model will likely focus on further optimizing resource usage and making AI more accessible to companies and researchers with limited computing resources.
Deepseek's open-source AI efforts have attracted the attention of developer communities around the world. In the future, we may see more developer-friendly APIs, better ways to fine-tune models, and deeper integration with existing platforms, which will likely lead to greater adoption.
One of the biggest obstacles Deepseek faces is content censorship and privacy concerns, especially given its ties to China. To achieve broader global adoption, Deepseek may need to adopt decentralized AI solutions and regional data policies that ensure user privacy and reduce government influence.
While DeepSeek is primarily focused on text-based LLM, future developments could include multimodal models that can process text, images, audio, and video, similar to OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo and Gemini models.
DeepSeek offers several advantages that make it an attractive alternative and has quickly become a strong competitor to ChatGPT. One of its biggest strengths is its cost-effectiveness and efficiency. DeepSeek's "expert mix" architecture allows for more efficient use of computational resources, reducing operational costs compared to ChatGPT, which is based on a fully dense model. This allows enterprises and developers to take advantage of high-quality AI without excessive operational costs.
Another key advantage is DeepSeek's open-source approach, as opposed to OpenAI's more restricted model. DeepSeek fosters innovation by making its models public, allowing researchers, startups, and enterprises to optimize and customize AI models according to their needs, something that would be difficult with ChatGPT's proprietary structure.