DeepSeek
DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company based in Hangzhou that develops open-weight large language models, spun off in 2023 from the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer. It became globally known in January 2025 when its R1 reasoning model matched top Western AI systems at a fraction of the reported training cost, triggering a massive selloff in US tech stocks. This page updates automatically every day: the timeline grows as news breaks, and the analysis refreshes with it.
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Where do DeepSeek's models rank this week? See the live AI tier list and our head-to-head comparisons. New to the vocabulary? The plain-English glossary covers every term below.
Timeline
This timeline grows automatically as news breaks. 10 events on record.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who owns DeepSeek?
DeepSeek is majority owned and was solely funded by founder Liang Wenfeng, who also co-founded the hedge fund High-Flyer that backed it. After its June 2026 funding round, Liang still controls the company through a limited partnership, while Tencent, CATL and China's state AI fund hold minority stakes without voting rights except the state fund.
Is DeepSeek's AI free to use?
Yes, DeepSeek's chatbot is free to use on web and mobile, and its models (including V4 Pro and V4 Flash) are released as open weights on Hugging Face under an MIT license, letting developers download and modify them for local or commercial use.
How did DeepSeek disrupt the AI industry?
In January 2025, DeepSeek's R1 model delivered performance comparable to OpenAI's o1 while reportedly costing far less to train, which rattled markets and erased roughly $600 billion from Nvidia's market value in a single day. This challenged assumptions that frontier AI required massive US-style capital expenditure.
What chips does DeepSeek use for training?
DeepSeek historically trained on Nvidia H800 chips before US export restrictions tightened, and its 2026 V4 models were built with support from Huawei's Ascend 950 processors and Cambricon chips. This shift reflects Beijing's push to reduce reliance on Nvidia hardware.
How does DeepSeek V4 compare to GPT and Gemini?
DeepSeek claims V4 Pro rivals or beats GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3.0 Pro on some reasoning tasks and matches GPT-5.4 on coding benchmarks, though it lags top frontier models by an estimated 3 to 8 months on knowledge tests. Its main edge is price, with output tokens costing dramatically less than Western competitors.
