DeepSeek

DeepSeek is an AI research lab and chatbot platform known for its high-performing, open-weight large language models. It offers a free web-based chat assistant capable of general conversation, reasoning, coding help, and content generation, positioning itself as a cost-effective alternative to closed-source AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude. DeepSeek's models, including its reasoning-focused releases, are recognized for achieving competitive performance on benchmarks while being significantly cheaper to run, which has made the company a notable disruptor in the AI industry. In addition to the consumer chat interface, DeepSeek provides API access for developers who want to integrate its models into their own applications, along with open-weight model releases that researchers and developers can download, self-host, and fine-tune. DeepSeek is widely used for tasks such as answering questions, writing and debugging code, summarizing documents, and general reasoning, and is popular among developers and businesses looking for a lower-cost or self-hostable alternative to proprietary AI models.