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DeepSeek

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company founded in Hangzhou in July 2023 as a spin-off of the AGI research lab of High-Flyer, a hedge fund. It releases its main models with open weights.

Founded 2023Website deepseek.com Era Generative AI for everyone

2025 · 4 20242026
Events per year

What it is

DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. Its full legal name is Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd. [1]. It had about 160 employees in 2025 [1]. Its founder and chief executive is Liang Wenfeng [1].

Origins

DeepSeek was founded on 17 July 2023 as a spin-off of the AGI research lab of the hedge fund High-Flyer, which had announced the lab on 14 April 2023 [1]. High-Flyer was co-founded by Liang in 2015 and owns and funds DeepSeek. Wikipedia reports that Liang held an 84 percent stake through two shell companies as of May 2024 [1].

High-Flyer's computing infrastructure has its own history. Its Fire-Flyer 1 cluster dates from 2019, and Fire-Flyer 2 used 5,000 PCIe A100 GPUs in 625 nodes [1]. DeepSeek reportedly obtained 10,000 Nvidia A100 chips before U.S. export restrictions, and it has focused on efficiency on older hardware [1].

Models and releases

DeepSeek's release timeline runs from DeepSeek-Coder, released on 2 November 2023, through DeepSeek-LLM (29 November 2023), DeepSeek-MoE (9 January 2024), DeepSeek-V2 (May 2024), DeepSeek-V3 (December 2024), DeepSeek-R1 (20 January 2025), V3.1 (21 August 2025), V3.2 (1 December 2025), the V4 preview (24 April 2026) and V4.1-Flash (10 September 2026) [1].

The company releases its main models with open weights, and DeepSeek-R1 and later flagship models were published under the MIT License [1][5].

The DeepSeek-V3 technical report states that the final training run took 2.788 million H800 GPU hours, about $5.576 million at $2 per GPU hour, excluding prior research and experiments [2].

The R1 paper was published in Nature on 17 September 2025 after peer review. It is credited to the DeepSeek-AI team, with Liang Wenfeng as corresponding author [3].

Market attention

In late January 2025 DeepSeek's chatbot app overtook ChatGPT as the top free app on the U.S. App Store. Nvidia lost about $600 billion in market value in the same period, in what TIME called the largest single-company drop in U.S. stock-market history [4].

In February 2026 Anthropic accused DeepSeek of using thousands of fraudulent accounts to generate conversations with Claude for training [1].

Funding and infrastructure

After years of funding itself through High-Flyer, DeepSeek was reported by Wikipedia to have raised a US$7 billion Series A at a US$52 billion post-money valuation in May 2026 [1]. Bloomberg and the Financial Times reported IPO preparations in July 2026 [1]. In September 2026 Bloomberg reported plans for a data center in Inner Mongolia with about 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT chips [1].

Products and hiring

Since 2026 DeepSeek has also run a Search and Fetch API, powered by its in-house search engine, and a DeepSeek Harness agent toolkit [6]. TIME reported that DeepSeek's hiring favours skills over long experience, often recruits directly from universities, and has included people without computer-science backgrounds [4].

Position in the field

DeepSeek's releases combine open weights with a sustained focus on efficiency, a theme that runs through its training report and its work on older hardware [1][2].

20261

  1. UpdateDeepSeek-V4-Pro reaches general availability

    On 13 August 2026 DeepSeek launched the general-availability version of DeepSeek-V4-Pro, with agent upgrades, adjustable reasoning effort, OpenAI Responses API support and peak and off-peak API pricing.

20254

  1. Release01.AI launches the Wanzhi enterprise LLM platform

    On 17 March 2025, Chinese AI company 01.AI released Wanzhi, an enterprise one-stop platform for large models that supports DeepSeek, Qwen and its own Yi models, alongside customized DeepSeek deployment and fine-tuning tools.

  2. UpdateTencent Yuanbao integrates DeepSeek-R1

    On 13 February 2025 Tencent's Yuanbao app added DeepSeek-R1 beside Tencent's own Hunyuan models, and within days it rose to second place on China's App Store free chart.

  3. MilestoneDeepSeek app tops the U.S. App Store

    On 27 January 2025 DeepSeek's mobile app passed ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app on Apple's U.S. App Store. The same day Nvidia shares fell 17 percent, the biggest one-day loss in U.S. history for any company.

  4. ReleaseDeepSeek releases DeepSeek-R1 as an open reasoning model

    On 20 January 2025 DeepSeek released DeepSeek-R1 as an open reasoning model, claiming performance on par with OpenAI o1 on math, code and reasoning tasks. Its release coincided with a sharp drop in Nvidia's share price.

20241

  1. ReleaseDeepSeek releases DeepSeek-V3

    On 26 December 2024 DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V3, a mixture-of-experts model with 671 billion total parameters, together with its open model weights, a technical report and code.

Models and products over time

22
  1. 2023
    • Nov 2, 2023 DeepSeek Coder Model

      DeepSeek's first model release: a family of open-source code models from 1.3B to 33B parameters, trained from scratch on 2 trillion tokens and reported to beat Codex and GPT-3.5 on several benchmarks.

    • Nov 29, 2023 DeepSeek LLM (7B and 67B) Model

      DeepSeek LLM is DeepSeek's first general-purpose language model series, released on 29 November 2023 in 7B and 67B sizes, each with a base version and a chat version.

  2. 2024
    • Jan 9, 2024 DeepSeekMoE Model

      DeepSeekMoE is a mixture-of-experts architecture from DeepSeek, released in January 2024, that splits experts finely and keeps a few shared experts always active so that each expert holds focused knowledge. Its 16B open-weights model matched larger dense models at a fraction of the computation.

    • Feb 5, 2024 DeepSeekMath Model

      DeepSeekMath is a 7B-parameter open language model built for mathematical reasoning and released in 2024. It reached 51.7% on the competition-level MATH benchmark without external tools, and introduced GRPO, a reinforcement-learning algorithm that uses less memory than PPO.

    • May 7, 2024 DeepSeek-V2 Model

      DeepSeek-V2 is a mixture-of-experts language model released in May 2024 with 236B total parameters, of which 21B are activated per token. It introduced Multi-head Latent Attention and used DeepSeekMoE for economical sparse training.

    • Jun 17, 2024 DeepSeek-Coder-V2 Model

      An open-source mixture-of-experts code model from DeepSeek, released in June 2024, that widened language coverage and context length over its predecessor and reported benchmark results above several closed models.

    • Sep 5, 2024 DeepSeek-V2.5 Model

      DeepSeek-V2.5 is a model released on 5 September 2024 that merged DeepSeek's chat and code models into one, keeping both conversational and coding ability while improving safety scores.

    • Dec 13, 2024 DeepSeek-VL2 Model

      A family of open mixture-of-experts vision-language models from DeepSeek, released in three sizes from 1.0B to 4.5B activated parameters for document, chart and OCR understanding, succeeding DeepSeek-VL.

    • Dec 26, 2024 DeepSeek-V3 Model

      DeepSeek-V3 is an open-weight mixture-of-experts language model that DeepSeek released in December 2024. Each token uses 37 billion of its 671 billion parameters, and DeepSeek describes its chat model as comparable to leading closed-source systems.

  3. 2025
    • Jan 15, 2025 DeepSeek app Product

      The DeepSeek app is the company's official free chatbot, offered on the web and as mobile apps since 15 January 2025. It topped the U.S. App Store in late January 2025.

    • Jan 20, 2025 DeepSeek-R1 Model

      DeepSeek-R1 is an open-weight reasoning model that DeepSeek released on 20 January 2025. Built on DeepSeek-V3-Base and trained with reinforcement learning, it is released under the MIT License, which allows commercial use and distillation.

    • Jan 27, 2025 Janus-Pro Model

      Janus-Pro is DeepSeek's January 2025 multimodal model that handles both image understanding and text-to-image generation in one system, released in 1B and 7B sizes as a stronger successor to Janus.

    • Mar 24, 2025 DeepSeek-V3-0324 Model

      DeepSeek-V3-0324 is a March 2025 update to DeepSeek-V3 that keeps the same model structure while raising benchmark scores and moving to the MIT License.

    • Apr 30, 2025 DeepSeek-Prover-V2 Model

      DeepSeek's open-source model for formal theorem proving in Lean 4, trained with a subgoal-decomposition pipeline; it reached an 88.9% pass ratio on MiniF2F-test and introduced the ProverBench benchmark.

    • May 28, 2025 DeepSeek-R1-0528 Model

      An updated release of DeepSeek's open-weight reasoning model, published on 28 May 2025 under the MIT License, with markedly higher scores on competition math, science and coding benchmarks, plus system-prompt support and stronger function calling.

    • Aug 21, 2025 DeepSeek-V3.1 Model

      DeepSeek-V3.1, released on 21 August 2025 under the MIT License, was DeepSeek's first hybrid model, supporting both a thinking mode and a non-thinking mode in one set of weights. It has 671 billion total parameters, with 37 billion activated per token.

    • Sep 29, 2025 DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp Model

      An experimental DeepSeek model released on 29 September 2025 that introduced DeepSeek Sparse Attention to make long-context training and inference cheaper, shipped with open weights and an immediate API price cut.

    • Oct 20, 2025 DeepSeek-OCR Model

      DeepSeek-OCR is an open-source model of about 3B parameters that renders long text as 2D images and reads it back from a small number of vision tokens, testing whether optical compression can stand in for very long text contexts.

    • Nov 27, 2025 DeepSeekMath-V2 Model

      DeepSeekMath-V2, released on 27 November 2025, is a mathematical reasoning model trained to verify its own proofs. DeepSeek reported gold-level scores on IMO 2025 and CMO 2024 problems, and 118 of 120 on Putnam 2024.

    • Dec 1, 2025 DeepSeek-V3.2 and V3.2-Speciale Model

      DeepSeek-V3.2, released on 1 December 2025, succeeded the experimental V3.2-Exp and integrated thinking into tool use. Its companion V3.2-Speciale, which maximizes reasoning, reached gold-level results at several 2025 competitions.

  4. 2026
    • Apr 24, 2026 DeepSeek-V4 (V4-Pro and V4-Flash) Model

      DeepSeek-V4, released in preview on 24 April 2026, comprises V4-Pro and V4-Flash, two open mixture-of-experts models with a 1M-token context. Its architecture targets long-context efficiency, and its later releases extended the series with agent upgrades and multimodal input.

    • Sep 10, 2026 DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash Model

      DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, released on 10 September 2026 under the API name deepseek-flash, is a 552-billion-parameter multimodal mixture-of-experts model with a causal encoder-decoder design and a 1M-token context.

Notes and sources

  1. DeepSeekhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepSeek
  2. DeepSeek-V3 Technical Reporthttps://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19437
  3. DeepSeek-R1 incentivizes reasoning in LLMs through reinforcement learning (Nature 645, 633–638)https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12443585/
  4. Liang Wenfeng: The 100 Most Influential People of 2025https://time.com/collections/100-most-influential-people-2025/7273745/liang-wenfeng/
  5. DeepSeek V4 Preview Releasehttps://api-docs.deepseek.com/news/news260424
  6. DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash Releasehttps://api-docs.deepseek.com/news/news260910

Cite this page: DeepSeek. TellWorld, https://www.tellworld.net/companies/deepseek. Updated 2026-11-08