Chinese open-weight frontier model. V3 and R1 (reasoning) at…

DeepSeek

https://www.deepseek.com/

What it does?

Chinese open-weight frontier model. V3 and R1 (reasoning) at ~10-30x cheaper API rates than GPT or Claude. The model that briefly tanked NVIDIA's stock in Jan 2026.

Specialty

Assistant Code Assistants Research

Socials

TL;DR of This AI Tool

Target Audience

Developers who want near-frontier code and math capability without paying OpenAI prices at scale.
Businesses running high-volume API workloads where per-token cost is a real budget line item.
ML engineers who want to self-host a capable model without licensing headaches.
Researchers benchmarking reasoning models who need visible chain-of-thought output.
Solo founders shipping AI features who need production-grade output on a startup budget.

Features

Best price-to-performance ratio of any production-grade model currently available via API.
Open weights with permissive licensing — self-hosting is fully supported and practical.
R1 reasoning is genuinely competitive with o3 and Claude on math and code benchmarks.
No vendor lock-in: switch between hosted API and local inference without retraining or prompt changes.
Free tier at chat.deepseek.com is usable for real work, not just demos.

Pricing

Freemium

Pricing Details

Free chat at chat.deepseek.com / API: V3 $0.27 in / $1.10 out per M tokens

Reviews

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