DeepSeek

DeepSeek is built by High-Flyer, a Chinese quantitative hedge fund that decided to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic — and succeeded. DeepSeek-V3 was trained using roughly 2,000 Nvidia H800 GPUs at an estimated cost of $5.6 million, compared to the $100 million-plus and 16,000+ GPUs that leading Western labs have committed to comparable projects. The announcement shook markets in January 2025: Nvidia shares dropped sharply as investors questioned the assumed requirement for massive GPU clusters.

The chat interface at chat.deepseek.com is completely free with no query limits on the web app. The flagship DeepThink mode (powered by DeepSeek-R1) applies visible chain-of-thought reasoning — the model shows its thinking process step by step before delivering a final answer. This is functionally comparable to OpenAI o1 and o3 models but costs nothing for consumer use. DeepThink mode excels at coding problems, competitive mathematics, multi-step logic puzzles, and research synthesis tasks.

DeepSeek-V3.2 uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with 671 billion total parameters and approximately 37 billion active parameters per inference pass. The MoE design routes each query to specialized sub-networks rather than running the full model weight, which keeps inference costs low. The API starts at $0.14 per million input tokens — roughly 95% cheaper than GPT-4 Turbo — making it the most cost-efficient frontier-class API currently available for developers.

In coding benchmarks, DeepSeek-R1 matches or outperforms GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on several standard evaluations including HumanEval and LiveCodeBench. On AIME 2025, a competitive mathematics test, DeepSeek-R1 placed in the same tier as OpenAI o1. For coding-heavy or math-heavy workflows, DeepSeek is a credible free alternative to paid coding assistants.

Users should understand the privacy tradeoffs. Data is processed on servers in China, and the platform is operated by a Chinese company subject to Chinese data regulations. The US Navy, Italian data regulator, and several other government bodies have restricted or banned DeepSeek use on government devices. For personal use, research, and coding tasks without sensitive data, these concerns are manageable. For enterprise or regulated-industry workloads, users should review their compliance requirements before proceeding.

For developers, DeepSeek offers an OpenAI-compatible API, meaning existing code using the OpenAI Python SDK can switch to DeepSeek with minimal changes. The API supports function calling, JSON mode, and multi-turn conversations. File uploads and web search are available in the free chat interface. DeepSeek-R2 has been publicly discussed as the next generation and is expected later in 2026, though no official release date has been announced.