DeepSeek, founded in China in 2023 and backed by the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, released a model in January 2025 that triggered a significant reaction in global technology markets after claiming training costs far below what Western AI labs were reportedly spending, prompting investors to question the massive infrastructure spending underpinning the industry, notably affecting chip-maker stock prices.
Its models are released as open weights, letting developers download and run them independently rather than only through DeepSeek's own hosted service, an approach that made its capabilities widely and rapidly replicable across the AI research community. The free web and mobile app cover general chat, reasoning-focused tasks, and coding assistance.
DeepSeek's chat interface is free to use, with API access priced for developers separately. For anyone tracking how open-weight models from outside the traditional US AI labs are reshaping cost and competitive expectations across the industry, DeepSeek's 2025 release remains a specific, widely referenced turning point in that conversation.
