Founding of DeepSeek

DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company based in Hangzhou that develops large language models. It was founded by Liang Wenfeng, who also co-founded the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, which has funded its work. The company drew worldwide attention in January 2025 when it released its R1 reasoning model, which it said matched leading Western models at a much lower training cost. The news contributed to a sharp fall in the share prices of some chip makers, notably Nvidia. DeepSeek publishes many of its models with open weights under permissive licenses. Questions over censorship in line with Chinese regulations and over data privacy led several governments to restrict its use on official devices.

Open on the timeline