DeepSeek

Overview

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company founded in July 2023 as a spin-off from quantitative-trading firm High-Flyer. Its founder, Liang Wenfeng, is a hedge-fund manager who reinvested trading profits into AI research and a 10,000-GPU H100 cluster.

Disruptive impact

DeepSeek shocked global markets in January 2025 with the release of DeepSeek-R1, a frontier reasoning model with performance comparable to OpenAI's o1, released as open weights under an MIT-style license. The accompanying technical report claimed the model was trained for under US$6 million in compute — a fraction of the typical frontier-model budget.

The release wiped roughly US$1 trillion in market capitalisation from US tech stocks in a single day, with NVIDIA falling 17%.

Models

• DeepSeek-V2 (May 2024) — efficient MoE architecture
• DeepSeek-V3 (Dec 2024) — 671B-parameter MoE, Llama-comparable
• DeepSeek-R1 (Jan 2025) — open-weights reasoning model
• DeepSeek Coder V2 — programming-specialised

Open-weights strategy

All major DeepSeek models have been released with weights and detailed papers. The combination of frontier capability and permissive licensing has made DeepSeek widely deployed across the open-source AI stack.