The legal name of the company is Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd. — a Chinese research company registered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. Internationally, it operates under the brand DeepSeek AI, under which it publishes all its products and research. Founded in July 2023, the company focuses on developing fundamental artificial intelligence technologies.
The DeepSeek team has achieved a series of groundbreaking innovations in the architecture and training of large language models, setting new industry standards for efficiency. Their Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA) mechanism, first introduced in the DeepSeek-V2 model, optimizes memory usage by compressing the KV cache into latent vectors — reducing memory consumption by 93.3% and accelerating inference by 5.76x. This breakthrough enables models with up to 128K-token context windows to run efficiently even on consumer-grade hardware. Additionally, DeepSeek became the first in the industry to successfully implement large-scale FP8 training for a 671-billion-parameter model (DeepSeek-V3), enhanced by their novel DualPipe parallelism architecture, which reduced training costs by 10x compared to GPT-4-class models by minimizing pipeline stalls. Finally, their reasoning model DeepSeek-R1 demonstrated that it’s possible to abandon the traditional SFT+RLHF pipeline entirely, instead leveraging pure Reinforcement Learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to train agents capable of complex, multi-step planning and reasoning.
DeepSeek AI is one of the primary drivers of the open-source movement in AI. The company consistently releases its most advanced models — including the DeepSeek-V2, DeepSeek-R1, DeepSeek-V3, and DeepSeek-V3.1 families — under the permissive MIT license. These releases go beyond merely providing model weights: they are accompanied by comprehensive technical reports and, critically, open-source code for core infrastructure components. This empowers the global research community not only to use the models but also to deeply study, reproduce, and build upon the underlying technologies. DeepSeek AI is rightly regarded as one of the leading research centers and key players in the global AI industry, having convincingly proven that open models can compete head-to-head with commercial offerings — not through brute-force scaling, but by pioneering smarter, more technologically advanced, and economically efficient solutions.