DeepSeek
Also called: DeepSeek AI, DeepSeek-R1, DeepSeek chat
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI lab (founded 2023 in Hangzhou, spun out of the High-Flyer hedge fund) and the chatbot app of the same name. It builds open-weight large language models, notably the V3 general model and the R1 reasoning model, with R1 released under a permissive MIT license.
DeepSeek grew out of High-Flyer, a quantitative hedge fund, and frames its goal as researching artificial general intelligence. Unlike most frontier labs, it publishes its model weights openly, which is a big part of why it drew attention so fast.
The breakout moment came in January 2025, when DeepSeek-R1 launched and the DeepSeek app briefly became the most downloaded free app on the US App Store, alongside a sharp one-day drop in Nvidia’s stock. R1 is a reasoning model trained largely with reinforcement learning that rewards correct final answers instead of human-written steps. It was later published in Nature (September 2025) as the first major open-weight LLM to clear formal peer review, with a reported training cost near $294,000 on 512 H800 GPUs.
The models
- DeepSeek-V3: a mixture-of-experts general model (671B total parameters, 128K context) for everyday tasks.
- DeepSeek-R1: the reasoning model built on V3, released under the MIT license, competitive with closed reasoning models on math and coding benchmarks.
- By 2026 the headline line had moved to V4 (in preview since April 2026), with V3 and R1 still available as open-weight downloads.
The DeepSeek app is a free chatbot on web and mobile, plus a paid API. It includes an optional “Search the web” toggle that retrieves live results and attaches source links to answers, so it acts as an AI answer engine, not just an offline model.
How it affects your traffic
DeepSeek is one more AI surface where buyers ask questions instead of typing them into Google, and its web-search mode cites the pages it pulls from. If your brand is not among the sources it retrieves, you are absent from that answer, the same gap that shows up in ChatGPT and Perplexity. Our AI SEO work targets exactly this: structuring pages with clear, quotable claims so answer engines name you in the response rather than bury you under it.
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