What is DeepSeek?

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company that builds open-weight large language models, and it made global headlines in January 2025 when its R1 reasoning model matched Western frontier systems at a reported fraction of the training cost, briefly rattling AI stocks worldwide.

Where did DeepSeek come from?

The company grew out of High-Flyer, a Chinese quantitative hedge fund founded by Liang Wenfeng, who used the fund's GPU stockpile to spin up an AI research lab in 2023. That hedge-fund pedigree is part of why DeepSeek's efficiency claims landed so hard: a trading firm, not a Big Tech giant, appeared to out-engineer companies spending far more on compute.

What kind of models does DeepSeek build?

Like the open-source models covered elsewhere in this hub, DeepSeek's models are open-weight — anyone can download them, run them locally, and modify them, rather than only accessing them through a paid API. DeepSeek hasn't stood still, either. In April 2026 it released a preview of DeepSeek-V4, in "pro" and "flash" sizes, adding a couple of notable upgrades:

• A technique it calls Hybrid Attention Architecture for tracking long conversations.
• A 1-million-token context window large enough to hold an entire codebase in one prompt.

By DeepSeek's own account, V4-Pro beats other open models at math and coding and trails only Google's Gemini among closed models on general knowledge — vendor claims worth treating with some skepticism, as always.

Why does DeepSeek matter?

The bigger story is geopolitical: DeepSeek's rise showed that frontier-level AI isn't limited to a handful of well-funded US labs, and that Chinese labs can compete despite US restrictions on advanced chip exports.