DeepSeek

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI research company that has rapidly emerged as a leading developer of open-source large language models. Founded in 2023 and backed by quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, DeepSeek has released a series of models including DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1 that have demonstrated performance competitive with leading proprietary models at significantly lower training costs. The company's emphasis on efficiency and open-source distribution has disrupted assumptions about the capital requirements for frontier AI development.

DeepSeek has fundamentally challenged the assumption that frontier AI requires massive capital investment, demonstrating that efficient architecture design can match or exceed models costing 10x more to train.