DeepSeek is rewriting the rules of generative AI. Launched in January 2025 by a Hangzhou–based startup funded by hedge fund High-Flyer, DeepSeek unleashed two open-source LLMs—DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1—that match or beat closed-source giants while costing under $6 million to train.
What Makes DeepSeek So Disruptive?
DeepSeek’s secret sauce is its Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design and hardware-savvy optimizations. Rather than activating all 671 billion parameters on every query, only the most relevant “experts” wake up, slashing compute needs and costs. Researchers also targeted widely available Nvidia H800 GPUs using low-level PTX programming, achieving state-of-the-art performance on underpowered chips.
This schematic highlights DeepSeek’s architecture tweaks: MoE layers route tokens to specialist subnetworks, while Multi-Head Latent Attention accelerates inference through latent caching—innovations that let DeepSeek rival GPT-4 benchmarks without the eye-watering price tag.
The Meteoric Rise of the DeepSeek App
On January 20, 2025, DeepSeek debuted its free mobile chatbot for iOS and Android. By January 27, it soared to #1 in Apple’s App Store free rankings—ousting ChatGPT—and crashed Nvidia’s market cap by $600 billion in a single day.
Its intuitive interface offers two modes—DeepThink (R1) for chain-of-thought reasoning and DeepSeek-V3 for fast general-purpose chat—plus file reading and web search tools built in.
DeepSeek-V3 vs. DeepSeek-R1: Which Should You Use?
Feature | DeepSeek-V3 | DeepSeek-R1 |
|---|---|---|
Release Date | December 2024 | January 2025 |
Parameters | 671 billion (128k context) | 671 billion (128k context) |
Architecture | General-purpose MoE | MoE + reinforcement-learned reasoning |
Best For | Content generation, summarization | Multi-step reasoning, code logic, math proofs |
Cost (training) | Part of <$6 M | Part of <$6 M |
License | MIT (open weights) | MIT (open weights) |
Hands-On: Using DeepSeek Today
The DeepSeek web interface and mobile app let you:
Chat conversationally for brainstorming, drafting, or researching.
Invoke DeepThink (R1) to see its step-by-step solution process.
Upload documents (PDFs, Word) for instant summarization or Q&A.
Perform web searches without leaving the chat.
Watch this beginner tutorial to get started:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8tcA9-14JQ
Or learn about its internal “thought visualization” in this deep dive:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY4Z-9QlZ64
The Global Impact and What’s Next
DeepSeek’s emergence is being called AI’s “Sputnik moment,” as it shattered assumptions about how much hardware and money elite LLMs require. OpenAI, Anthropic, and even chip makers like Nvidia are racing to respond. Meanwhile, DeepSeek continues to roll out upgrades—V3.1 Terminus with hybrid thinking modes, V3.2-Exp sparse attention, and specialized vision and coding models—keeping it at the forefront of open AI innovation.
Whether you’re a developer looking to fine-tune an open-weight LLM, a startup seeking cost-efficient AI integration, or simply a chatbot enthusiast, DeepSeek has arrived—and it’s free, powerful, and completely open. Its success proves that efficient architecture + smart hardware use can democratize AI like never before.
