Glossary · 2 · The AI landscape: brands and model families
DeepSeek
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company based in Hangzhou that publishes open-weight large language models. Its reasoning model DeepSeek-R1, released in January 2025 under the MIT license, showed that competitive reasoning performance could be reached at much lower reported training cost.
- Intermediate
- Technical marketers
- Technical project managers
- Developers
- AI brand
In one sentence
DeepSeek in brief: the Chinese developer of open-weight reasoning models, why R1 mattered, and what to check before using its app or API.
Example
A research team downloads a DeepSeek model and runs it on its own servers to test reasoning on internal engineering questions.
Why it matters on your learning path
- Technical marketers: DeepSeek’s launch reset price expectations across the market.
- Technical project managers: The hosted app and API are subject to Chinese law and have been restricted by some governments and companies; self-hosting the weights is a different risk profile.
- Developers: Open weights allow local deployment and distillation into smaller models, under the published license.
Keep in mind
Product names, model versions and prices change often. This entry describes the brand’s position as of its review date; check the vendor’s own pages before you cite a model name or capability.