DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company founded in 2023 by entrepreneur Liang Wenfeng. Based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, and funded by the Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, DeepSeek focuses on developing open-source large language models (LLMs).

In January 2025, DeepSeek unveiled its AI model, DeepSeek-R1, which matches the reasoning capabilities of leading models like OpenAI's ChatGPT but was developed at a significantly lower cost. The company claims that DeepSeek-R1 was built for just $6 million, contrasting sharply with the hundreds of millions to billions spent by firms like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Following its release, DeepSeek's AI assistant quickly became the top free app on Apple's App Store, surpassing ChatGPT. This development led to significant market reactions, including a substantial decline in the stock prices of major tech companies like Nvidia, which saw its shares drop by 17%.

DeepSeek has made its generative AI chatbot open source, allowing developers worldwide to access and build upon its code. However, there have been observations that the official API version of R1 employs censorship mechanisms for topics considered politically sensitive in China. For instance, the model may refuse to answer questions about events like the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests or issues related to human rights in China.

The emergence of DeepSeek has been described as a "Sputnik moment" for the AI industry, highlighting China's growing capabilities in artificial intelligence and prompting discussions about the global AI race.