DeepSeek is a Hangzhou-based artificial-intelligence company that builds large language models (LLMs) and open-source tooling for code, research and everyday productivity. Founded in July 2023 by hedge-fund veteran Liang Wenfeng, the firm has released a fast-iterating model family—including DeepSeek-V3, R1 and DeepSeek Coder—that rivals frontier systems on reasoning, math and programming benchmarks while remaining MIT-licensed for commercial use.
The company pairs its proprietary training framework with a 10 000-GPU cluster to push low-cost, high-throughput inference, exposing its models through a ChatGPT-compatible API, web chat and mobile apps. DeepSeek’s rapid growth—its R1 chatbot topped the U.S. iOS charts in January 2025—illustrates China’s accelerating presence in open generative AI and has drawn comparisons with Silicon Valley leaders.