DeepSeek

Editorial Review

DeepSeek burst onto the global AI scene by demonstrating that frontier-level model performance doesn't require frontier-level budgets. Its R1 reasoning model and V3 general-purpose model consistently benchmark near the top of independent evaluations, particularly in coding, mathematics, and structured reasoning tasks — often matching or exceeding models from labs with far larger compute budgets. The value proposition is hard to ignore. The web chat is completely free with no message limits, and the API is priced at a steep discount compared to comparable models from OpenAI or Anthropic. For developers and startups building AI-powered products, DeepSeek offers an OpenAI-compatible API that makes migration straightforward. The open-weight releases (under the custom DeepSeek License, which permits broad commercial use with some restrictions) also make it one of the few frontier-class models you can fully self-host, which is critical for organizations with strict data sovereignty requirements. The primary considerations are around ecosystem maturity and data handling. As a China-based company, DeepSeek's data practices are subject to Chinese jurisdiction, which may be a concern for some users and enterprises — though self-hosting the open-weight models entirely sidesteps this issue. The web interface and documentation are functional but less polished than Western competitors, and the model can occasionally underperform on nuanced English creative writing or culturally Western contexts compared to models trained primarily on English-language data.