DeepSeek
DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company that develops large language models and conducts research toward artificial general intelligence. Founded in July 2023 by [[liang-wenfeng]] as a spin-off of the quantitative hedge fund [[high-flyer]], the company is headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, and is privately held. DeepSeek's models are notable for achieving performance competitive with leading closed-source systems at a fraction of the development cost, using older, export-restricted hardware and novel architectural innovations.
The company's model lineage began with [[deepseek-coder|DeepSeek Coder]] and [[deepseek-llm|DeepSeek-LLM]] in late 2023 and progressed through [[deepseek-v2]] (May 2024), which introduced the [[multi-head-latent-attention]] mechanism that dramatically reduced inference memory requirements. [[deepseek-v3]] (December 2024), a 671-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model trained for approximately $5.6 million, matched the performance of leading proprietary models. [[deepseek-r1]] (January 2025) demonstrated that advanced reasoning capabilities could be elicited through pure reinforcement learning using [[group-relative-policy-optimization]], and its release as a mobile app triggered a historic one-day selloff in U.S. technology stocks that erased approximately $600 billion from Nvidia's market capitalization alone. The R1 research paper became the first large language model publication to appear on the cover of Nature after peer review. Later releases include [[deepseek-v3|DeepSeek-V3.1 and V3.2]] with hybrid thinking modes and [[deepseek-sparse-attention]], and [[deepseek-v4]] (April 2026), which at 1.6 trillion parameters is the largest open-weight model available.
DeepSeek's open-source strategy, releasing models under the MIT License, has reshaped global AI competition by making frontier-level capabilities freely available and driving down industry pricing. The company complements this with a paid API service that maintains a significant cost advantage over rival providers. DeepSeek maintains a small team that grew from around 160 employees in 2025 to approximately 317 by April 2026, with a flat, academy-inspired culture that prioritizes talent density and hires fresh graduates from leading Chinese universities. In April 2026, DeepSeek began its first external funding round at a valuation of approximately $50 billion. Founder Liang Wenfeng attended a private enterprise symposium hosted by Xi Jinping in February 2025, signaling Beijing's endorsement. The company's models have drawn scrutiny for systematic content censorship of politically sensitive topics—which DeepSeek has publicly acknowledged as intentional design to reflect Chinese government positions—and for alleged involvement in model distillation disputes with U.S. AI firms, which the company formally addressed in the peer-reviewed supplementary materials of its R1 paper.