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DeepSeek

AI · China · Founded 2023

DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company that develops open-source, cost-effective large language models (LLMs). The company was founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, who also co-founded the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, which owns and funds DeepSeek. Liang, a graduate of Zhejiang University with a background in AI, started his career in quantitative trading, founding High-Flyer in 2016 and using AI for trading algorithms. Seeing an opportunity to close the AI gap between China and the US, Liang spun off an AGI research lab from High-Flyer to create DeepSeek as a standalone, research-focused entity. DeepSeek's business model centers on providing powerful AI solutions that are accessible to a broad audience, challenging the high-cost, proprietary models from competitors. The company generates revenue through competitively priced API access to its models, while also leveraging its AI expertise and GPU infrastructure for quantitative trading. Its open-source approach allows developers and researchers free access to its model weights, fostering community-driven innovation and wider adoption. The company provides multiple services including a web interface, mobile application, and API access. The company has released a series of generative AI models, starting with DeepSeek Coder in November 2023, designed for coding tasks. A key innovation is their use of a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, which activates only a subset of a model's parameters for a given task, significantly reducing computational costs and improving efficiency. Their models, such as DeepSeek-V2 and DeepSeek-Coder-V2, demonstrate strong performance in coding, mathematical reasoning, and general language tasks, often rivaling leading closed-source models. DeepSeek-Coder-V2 supports over 338 programming languages and features a large context window. Keywords: large language models, open-source AI, Mixture-of-Experts, MoE, artificial intelligence, generative AI, AI research, cost-efficient AI, coding AI, AI development, natural language processing, DeepSeek-V2, DeepSeek Coder, API access, machine learning, AI models, quantitative trading, AI assistant, chatbot