DeepSeek has turned the AI market upside down. The world is amazed at how this startup managed to create advanced AI models in much less time and with much less money than its US rivals like OpenAI.

The impact? DeepSeek became the most downloaded app on the Apple App Store. It wiped $1 trillion off the US stocks in a single day. And Donald Trump called DeepSeek "a wake-up call" for US AI companies.

Read this post to learn what DeepSeek is, how it's changing the AI market, what makes it special, and how you can use it to grow your business.

What is DeepSeek?

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company that builds open-source large language models. Based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, the company was founded by Liang Wenfeng in May 2023 and funded by the hedge fund High-Flyer.

Recently, DeepSeek has launched two advanced AI models—V3 and R1. DeepSeek V3 is an efficient model suitable for general-purpose applications like conversational AI and content generation. On the other hand, DeepSeek R1 specializes in reasoning tasks like coding and solving math problems. The company has also introduced other models like DeepSeek Coder, Math, and V2.

Since the release of R1 on January 20, 2025, DeepSeek has got everyone talking. American businessman Marc Andreessen described DeepSeek R1 as “AI's Sputnik moment.” The Chinese company claims to have developed these advanced AI models with limited computing resources, yet their performance rivals OpenAI’s models.

Why is DeepSeek disrupting the AI sector?

DeepSeek's AI models are high-performing, affordable, and open-source. A very rare combination. Unsurprisingly, on January 27th, DeepSeek became the most downloaded free app in the US on the Apple App Store, overtaking OpenAI's ChatGPT.

DeepSeek claims to have built an AI model in under two months for just $6 million, using fewer, less advanced AI chips. To give you better context, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, once stated that training GPT-4 costs over $100 million. We don’t know how exactly DeepSeek managed this. However, this has shaken the foundations of major AI companies like Nvidia, Google, Meta, and Microsoft.

DeepSeek's affordable AI models sparked doubts among investors and led to a 3% drop in the Nasdaq Composite and a 1.5% drop in the S&P 500. The AI chip maker Nvidia’s market value dropped nearly $600 billion on 27th January—the biggest one-day loss for a US company.

Although the stock market is now recovering, DeepSeek has proved that capable AI models can be built with limited computing. Even Sam Altman admitted that DeepSeek R1 is “an impressive model.”

5 futuristic features of DeepSeek

Here are five key features of DeepSeek that have sent shockwaves through the tech world:

1. High-performance models

DeepSeek V3 and R1 are high-performance large language models. V3 uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MOE) architecture with 671 billion total parameters. It’s pre-trained on 14.8 trillion high-quality tokens to give it a deep understanding of natural language.

R1, built on the foundation of V3, supports a context length of up to 128k tokens, which enables it to process and respond to long and complex inputs. This model is seen to outperform OpenAI o1 and Claude 3.5 in reasoning and coding tasks.

The company has also built an image generation model, Janus-Pro-7B, which is also said to outperform its rivals like DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion.

2. Advanced architectures

DeepSeek uses state-of-the-art architectures to develop its models. Here are two examples:

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE): It enables the DeepSeek V3 model to activate only a small fraction of parameters out of 671 billion parameters for a task, making the computation efficient.

Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA): The company introduced this novel technique that enables an AI model to understand complex queries and their context by focusing on different parts of the input text simultaneously.

3. Open-source

Unlike OpenAI, whose models are proprietary, DeepSeek has made its models open-source. This means anyone can access them for free. Developers, researchers, and organizations can use, modify, and share the code and documentation. This can help researchers worldwide collaborate and create innovative solutions.

4. Efficient and cost-effective

DeepSeek's models are highly efficient because they require fewer resources, which significantly reduces computational costs. This makes them much more affordable than competitors.

For instance, OpenAI’s o1 API costs $15 per million input tokens and $60 per million output tokens. In comparison, DeepSeek R1 costs just $0.55 per million input and $2.19 per million output tokens. This makes DeepSeek's input cost 96.4% cheaper than OpenAI’s.

Similarly, when compared to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, DeepSeek V3 is 99.5% cheaper for input tokens and 98.1% cheaper for output tokens.

The availability of capable AI models at such low cost has started a price war. The good news? Startups and small businesses can now access high-performance AI models without breaking the bank.

5. Scalable and real-world use cases

Just like OpenAI, DeepSeek's models have real-world applications like research, summarization, content generation, customer support, report generation, data analysis, language translation, coding, and math problem-solving.

They can power AI agents, AI chatbots, and AI assistants that can automate time-consuming tasks and simplify business workflows. These scalable applications across industries like finance, education, health care, retail, technology, etc., at low cost are a breakthrough.

How to access DeepSeek?

Here are two ways to access DeepSeek:

Chat platform: This lets you use DeepSeek’s V3 and R1-powered chat platforms. Simply go to DeepSeek’s website, select Start Now, and create your account. You can also use the app by downloading it from Google Play or Apple App Store.

API access: DeepSeek API lets you integrate its AI model into your software. You can register on the platform to obtain the API key.

How to use DeepSeek to grow your business?

DeepSeek is upending AI by developing high-performance AI models that require limited computing. Thanks to their efficient AI models, you can now automate processes and achieve business goals at a fraction of the cost.

Chatsimple lets you build DeepSeek-powered AI agents for inbound sales and support. These AI agents engage your website visitors and help them find what they need through human-like voice interactions. They can promote your products, qualify leads, book sales meetings, and assist you with follow-ups to close deals.

Powered by DeepSeek V3, these AI agents are both smart and cost-effective, having 80% cheaper operational costs. Plus, you can build a custom AI agent in just five minutes without writing a single line of code. Visit this page to learn more about Chatsimple’s AI agents.