DeepSeek
The lab whose open reasoning models shifted the landscape
China Frontier lab Open weights
WHAT IT IS
DeepSeek was founded in 2023, incubated by the quantitative fund High-Flyer. It focuses on foundation-model research, centred on mixture-of-experts architectures and reasoning models, and keeps releasing model weights. It shipped V3 in late 2024 and the reasoning model R1 in early 2025.
Why it matters
R1 shipped near-frontier reasoning with open weights and a published training method, directly resetting expectations for how much compute reasoning models need and pushing peers to reprice.
Key milestones
- 2023
Founded, incubated by High-Flyer
- 2024
Released DeepSeek-V3 with open weights
- 2025
Released the reasoning model DeepSeek-R1