DeepSeek

DeepSeek is an AI research lab in Hangzhou, China, founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng and funded by the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer. The lab releases open-weight language and reasoning models under permissive licenses and serves them through a token-priced, OpenAI-compatible API. Teams pick DeepSeek when they need to inspect, fine-tune, or self-host the weights behind their application. The R1 release in January 2025 demonstrated that open-weight reasoning models could approach closed frontier systems on math and coding benchmarks, and the lab has shipped successive V3 and R1 updates since.

Key Capabilities:

• Open-weight V3 and R1 model families under MIT licensing

• Reasoning models with exposed chain-of-thought traces

• OpenAI-compatible chat completions API

• Context caching that lowers the cost of repeated prompt prefixes

• Function calling and JSON output modes

• Self-hostable through vLLM, SGLang, and Ollama