DeepSeek

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI research lab founded in 2023 as a subsidiary of High-Flyer, a quantitative trading firm based in Hangzhou. The company gained international attention in January 2025 with DeepSeek R1, an open-weight reasoning model that rivaled OpenAI's o1, and DeepSeek V3, which achieved GPT-4o-level performance at a reported training cost of just $5.6 million. DeepSeek releases all models under MIT license and has been influential in demonstrating that frontier-level AI can be developed at dramatically lower cost than previously assumed.