DeepSeek it’s one Chinese startup active in the artificial intelligence sector which is rapidly gaining attention. Founded in May 2023 by Liang Wenfenghedge fund and AI expert, the company stands out for an innovative approach that offers advanced AI models to significantly lower costs than competitors. Thanks to the use of advanced techniques machine learninglike reinforcement learning and MoE architecture, DeepSeek has achieved exceptional performance without compromising resource efficiency. The Chinese company has also chosen to make its models open source, thus contributing to democratization of artificial intelligence. Let’s take a closer look at the technologies developed by DeepSeek, its impact on the giants of Silicon Valley – above all OpenAI, Google and Meta – and its pricing strategies, which could potentially impact the entire AI landscape.
The efficiency of DeepSeek models
DeepSeek’s goal is clear: to compete with tech giants in the field of artificial intelligence. In the November 2023 launched its first significant product, DeepSeek Coderan open source template for coding tasks. This was followed by the linguistic model DeepSeek LLMwith 67 billion parameters and, in May 2024the model DeepSeek-V2which has attracted great attention for its high performance at a significantly lower cost than its competitors. These models stand out for their ability to reduce the consumption of computational resourcesthanks to techniques such asreinforcement learningwhich allows them to progressively improve skills through trial and error.
Another strong point of DeepSeek’s strategy is theMoE architecture (Mixture of Experts), which activates only part of the parameters for each specific task. This approach significantly reduces computing costs and improves efficiencyallowing high performance with less use of resources. Also the ability to use themulti-headed latent attentionintegrated into the model DeepSeek-V3allows you to process complex inputs with greater precision, managing multiple aspects of the information simultaneously.
In the January 2025the company launched DeepSeek-R1an advanced model for reasoning tasks, which has been put into direct competition with the most advanced OpenAI models. This demonstrates DeepSeek’s determination to position itself as a major player in the global market. The startup has also developed distilled models, such as DeepSeek-R1-Distillwhich combine the efficiency of smaller models with the advanced capabilities of larger models.
The difference between DeepSeek and the competition
The differences between DeepSeek and the competition are to be found above all in its business model. Funded exclusively by High-Flyera hedge fund founded by Liang Wenfengthe company is not dependent on external investors and can focus on long-term research. Despite its success, DeepSeek still has no concrete plans for large-scale commercialization, preferring to focus on research and development.
His cost containment policy it is a key aspect of DeepSeek and is clearly reflected in its fees, which are significantly lower than those of its competitors. Just think that theDeepSeek-R1 APIfor example, only costs $0.55 per million input tokens And $2.19 per million output tokensmuch less than similar models from other giants such as OpenAI, which asks for 15 dollars per million input tokens and 60 dollars per million output tokens! This remarkable cost efficiency could push DeepSeek’s competitors to reduce their prices to remain competitive.
Another distinctive aspect of the company is theopen source approachwhich allows small businesses and independent developers to access advanced technologies without having to face exorbitant costs, to say the least.
The challenges of DeepSeek and the limits of censorship
So far so good. But it must also be said that DeepSeek faces several challenges. One of the main ones concerns the limited availability of advanced computing resourcesdue to controls on chip exports from the United States (and with the election of Donald Trump, things could get even more complicated). While DeepSeek has demonstrated great efficiency in resource management, access to more powerful hardware is essential to maintaining competitiveness with Silicon Valley competitors.
Furthermore, being a Chinese company, DeepSeek has to deal with the censorship of his models to avoid the spread of content contrary to the Chinese Communist Party. This could potentially represent a significant obstacle to its global adoptionparticularly in countries where freedom of expression is a fundamental and indisputable value. Whether DeepSeek will be able to overcome these challenges or not, only time will tell.
