DeepSeek

DeepSeek (Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd.) is a Chinese AI company developing frontier large language models, owned and funded by High-Flyer, a Chinese hedge fund. Founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng (also CEO of High-Flyer), DeepSeek has produced a series of open-weight models — including DeepSeek-V3, a 671B Mixture-of-Experts model, and DeepSeek-R1, a reasoning model comparable to OpenAI's o1 — at a fraction of the training cost of Western competitors. The company claimed to have trained DeepSeek-V3 for approximately $6 million, versus $100M+ for GPT-4, by using efficient MoE architectures and fewer, weaker AI chips. Its models are released under the MIT License and available on GitHub and Hugging Face, positioning DeepSeek as a leading open-source AI research lab. The company primarily hires researchers from top Chinese universities and recruits across disciplines beyond traditional computer science.