DeepSeek

DeepSeek is an artificial intelligence company that specializes in developing large language models and AI applications. Founded in 2023, DeepSeek has quickly gained attention in the AI industry for its innovative approaches to natural language processing and generation.
DeepSeek released its R1 model on January 20, 2025, explaining in a detailed paper how to build a large language model on a very small budget that can learn and improve itself without human supervision. DeepSeek said it had taken only two months and less than $6 million to build a model more advanced than many of its Western competitors. The release astonished Silicon Valley and wiped out $1 trillion in market value from U.S. and European stocks, including Nvidia, on January 27, 2025.
Deepseek also said that its engineers used only a fraction of the specialized computer chips that leading A.I. companies use to train their systems.
DeepSeek focuses on research rather than making products for consumers, and it is willing to share its breakthroughs with other businesses and researchers. DeepSeek has thus far not raised money from outside funds or made significant moves to monetize its models.
== History ==
DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, who also co-founded the High-Flyer hedge fund. The company is based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China. DeepSeek operates independently but is solely funded by High-Flyer. The company's founding goal was to create more advanced and efficient large language models that could compete with established players in the field.
=== Technological Approach ===
DeepSeek differentiates itself through its focus on efficient training methods and novel architectural improvements in language models. The company claims to achieve high performance with fewer parameters and less computational resources compared to some competitors, making its models more accessible and cost-effective for deployment.
DeepSeek's journey began in November 2023 with the release of DeepSeek Coder, an open-source model designed for coding tasks. This was followed by DeepSeek LLM, a 67B parameter model aimed at competing with other large language models.
In May 2024, DeepSeek launched DeepSeek-V2, which gained significant attention for its strong performance and low cost. This release triggered a price war in the Chinese AI model market, with DeepSeek's disruptive pricing strategy forcing other major Chinese tech giants, such as ByteDance, Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba, to lower their AI model prices to remain competitive.
DeepSeek-V2 was succeeded by DeepSeek-Coder-V2, a more advanced model with 236 billion parameters. Designed for complex coding challenges, it features a high context length of up to 128K tokens. This model is available through a cost-effective API, priced at $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens.
The company's latest models, DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1, have further solidified its position as a disruptive force in the AI industry. DeepSeek-V3, a 671B parameter model, boasts impressive performance on various benchmarks while requiring significantly fewer resources than its peers. DeepSeek-R1, released in January 2025, focuses on reasoning tasks and challenges OpenAI's GPT-4 model with its advanced capabilities.
== Products and Services ==
DeepSeek's primary offerings include:
# DeepSeek LLM: A large language model trained on vast amounts of text data, capable of natural language understanding and generation across multiple languages and domains.
# DeepSeek Coder: An AI-powered coding assistant that can generate, explain, and debug code in various programming languages.
# DeepSeek Chat: An interactive chatbot powered by DeepSeek's language models, designed for both consumer and enterprise applications.
# API Services: DeepSeek provides API access to its models, allowing developers and businesses to integrate its AI capabilities into their own applications and services.
The company has gained particular recognition for the performance of its models on various AI benchmarks, often competing with or surpassing models from larger, more established companies.
== Key People ==
*Liang Wenfeng, CEO
== References ==
Category:Artificial Intelligence
Category:Technology Companies
Category:Natural Language Processing
Category:Machine Learning