DeepSeek

DeepSeek is an AI company based in Hangzhou, China, spun out of the hedge fund High-Flyer. It releases its language models as open-source LLMs – free to download and use commercially. In early 2025, its reasoning model R1 made global headlines: frontier-level performance at a fraction of typical training costs.

Current models

DeepSeek-V4 has been available since April 2026, in two variants: V4-Pro (1.6 trillion parameters, 49 billion active) and V4-Flash (284 billion parameters, 13 billion active). Both use a mixture-of-experts architecture and handle up to 1 million tokens of context.

Benchmark standing

On agentic benchmarks, V4-Pro scores at the level of leading Western models from OpenAI and Anthropic – at significantly lower API prices.

Open source and self-hosting

The V4 models are released under the MIT license. Companies can download the weights, adapt them, and run them as self-hosted AI on their own infrastructure.

Data protection in the China context

For EU companies, one distinction matters: the official DeepSeek API and app process data on servers in China. Self-hosting avoids this entirely – the model weights themselves transmit no data. See digital sovereignty.

Last updated: June 2026