DeepSeek.

In plain English

A Chinese lab that shook the industry in 2025 by building powerful AI far more cheaply than people thought possible. Its models are cheap to use, and many are open weight, released under the MIT licence, so you can download them and run them on your own hardware. The biggest need serious computing power, but smaller versions can run on a powerful laptop.

Models to know

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, which handles images, charts and text. DeepSeek V4 Pro, a text-only model for heavy reasoning, coding, complex logic and multi-step agent work. Expect it to cost more than Flash.

Who's in charge

Liang Wenfeng, founder.

Things to be aware of

The US has limited the export of its most advanced AI chips to China since 2022, so Chinese labs have had to work with less powerful chips than the Nvidia ones most US AI is built on. That's forced them to find ways to do more with less memory and computing power, which is one reason their models can do a task far more cheaply than US rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic.

All models have layers of controls built in, but Chinese law requires AI to reflect government-approved values, so models like DeepSeek's are trained to avoid or deflect politically sensitive questions.

Several governments have restricted it. Italy's data protection regulator blocked it on 30 January 2025 over how it handled Italian users' personal data, including data stored in China. On 4 February 2025, Australia banned it from all government devices and systems, saying it posed an unacceptable risk to national security.