What is DeepSeek? All you need to know about the Chinese AI

You’ve likely heard about OpenAI and its famous model, ChatGPT. But across the globe, another significant player is making considerable strides in artificial intelligence (AI).

This company, hailing from China, is called DeepSeek. While the spotlight often shines on Silicon Valley, DeepSeek is quietly building powerful AI, and its recent advancements are starting to turn heads globally. 

According to Reuters, DeepSeek overtook similar app downloads and caused US stocks like Nvidia’s to sink.

From their unique training methods to the performance of their models, DeepSeek offers a fascinating glimpse into the diverse and rapidly changing artificial intelligence tech.

Let’s unpack what makes DeepSeek a name you’ll likely be hearing a lot more of.

What is DeepSeek?

DeepSeek is an artificial intelligence company and AI model developed in Hangzhou, China, in 2023. They focus on developing large language models (LLMs) and other AI technologies.

It’s gained recognition for its impressive performance in various AI benchmarks, including:

• Broad language understanding
• Complex coding
• Mathematical reasoning
• Multi-domain language understanding
• Advanced reasoning and problem solving

In January 2025, the latest version of its AI model, DeepSeek-R1, was released. This iteration is focused on open-source reasoning capabilities.

OpenAI vs DeepSeek

OpenAI is perhaps the most well-known AI research and deployment company globally. They created ChatGPT and DALL-E. OpenAI has significantly shaped how we see generative AI.

DeepSeek, while perhaps less of a household name internationally, is a strong competitor. Both companies develop advanced LLMs. However, their approaches and focuses can differ.

One key difference lies in their origins and primary markets. OpenAI is based in the United States. DeepSeek operates out of China. This geographical difference can influence their research priorities and the data they train their models on.

In terms of model performance, DeepSeek’s models have shown strong capabilities, sometimes even outperforming certain OpenAI models (GPT-4o, o1) on specific benchmarks.

For example, their 33B parameter model reportedly achieved impressive results in multilingual and code generation tasks. This highlights DeepSeek’s technical prowess in AI development.

While OpenAI has a broader portfolio of AI products, DeepSeek’s current public focus appears to be heavily on advancing its language models.

DeepSeek AI training innovations

DeepSeek’s training strategy for its R1 models reportedly involves a shorter instruction period, a lower overall development cost, and less use of AI accelerators.

Their research paper detailed several innovative techniques they developed for the R1 model, including:

• Distillation. Using optimal ways to transfer knowledge, DeepSeek’s researchers successfully squeezed capabilities into smaller models (as small as 1.5 billion parameters)
• Reinforcement learning – The company utilised this large-scale method, specifically focused on enhancing reasoning skills in its AI.
  
• Reward engineering – Their researchers created a rule-based system to reward the model during training. This system was found to be more effective for reasoning tasks than the neural reward models often used.
  
• Emergent behavior network – DeepSeek made the fascinating observation that complex reasoning abilities can spontaneously develop within their AI models through reinforcement learning. This happens without the need for direct, step-by-step instructions for those specific reasoning patterns.

DeepSeek large language models

DeepSeek has developed a series of large language models. These models are built with the goal of comprehending and producing text that mirrors human language.

So far, DeepSeek has released the following models:

1. DeepSeek Coder (November 2023): This marked DeepSeek’s initial foray into open-source models specifically engineered for coding tasks.

2. DeepSeek LLM (December 2023): This was the debut of DeepSeek’s LLM for general purposes. It represented the first iteration of their AI designed for a wide variety of language-based tasks.

3. DeepSeek-V2 (May 2024): The second version of DeepSeek’s general LLM arrived with a focus on delivering strong performance while also being more economical to train.

4. DeepSeek-Coder-V2 (July 2024): This updated coder model boasts a massive 236 billion parameters and can handle very long sequences of text (a context window of 128,000 tokens).

5. DeepSeek-V3 (December 2024): This iteration of their general-purpose model uses a “mixture-of-experts” design, allowing it to be versatile across different kinds of tasks

6. DeepSeek-R1 (January 2025): Built upon the DeepSeek-V3 architecture, this model specifically targets advanced reasoning capabilities.

DeepSeek aims for it to perform on par with OpenAI’s o1 model in reasoning tasks, but with a considerably more affordable cost structure.

7. Janus-Pro-7B (January 2025): This is DeepSeek’s entry into vision models. Janus-Pro-7B can process and create images, expanding DeepSeek’s AI capabilities beyond just text.

Issues raised by DeepSeek

While DeepSeek presents exciting possibilities, it also raises several critical concerns. Privacy remains a major issue, especially given the Chinese government’s tight control over data.

There are also questions about bias, transparency, and the ethical implications of using such powerful technology. 

In fact, this AI model has been banned from certain government and public sectors of the following countries:

• United States of America
• Italy
• South Korea
• Australia
• Taiwan

As DeepSeek continues to evolve, these challenges will likely shape the broader conversation around AI regulation and global tech competition.