DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company whose DeepSeek-V3 and R1 models achieved performance matching or exceeding GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet at a fraction of the training cost, sending shockwaves through the AI industry. The open-source R1 reasoning model offers transparent chain-of-thought reasoning that rivals OpenAI's o1 series while being freely available for download and deployment. AI developers and researchers worldwide use DeepSeek models as powerful, cost-efficient alternatives to proprietary models, with the open-weight releases enabling fine-tuning, local deployment, and derivative research without any API costs.