DeepSeek is the AI company from China (Hangzhou) that publishes language models with open weights and offers its own paid API. The R series (reasoning) and V series (general) models gained attention for code and math performance at low cost.
What it does
- Reasoning and problem solving with models that “think” before answering
- Coding help and code tasks
- Running published weights locally or using the official API
- Testing and fine-tuning on your own infrastructure
Models and license
- Open-weights families published regularly
- Models distributed under permissive licenses (check each version’s terms)
- Official API with per-token pricing published on the site
Public pricing
- Pay-as-you-go API with competitive per-token pricing
- Free weights for download (subject to license)
Strengths
- Low cost per token on the official API
- Good performance in reasoning and code
- Open weights for your own use
Points of attention
- Company based in China: review data and privacy policies
- API availability varies by region
- License terms change between versions