DeepSeek

DeepSeek is a family of large models from the Chinese lab behind it, with open-weight frontier models (V4, R1), a web app, mobile apps, and an open API.

AI Chatbot#LLM#Open Source#Inference

Updated: 2026-10-26

What is DeepSeek?

DeepSeek (DeepSeek) has the slogan "Explore the Uncharted Territories". Its official positioning is to focus on researching world-leading general artificial intelligence underlying models and technologies, and it has open-sourced cutting-edge large models such as DeepSeek-V4 and DeepSeek-R1. The official website currently announces that the new generation V4.1-Flash has been released. The official claims that its text and agent performance have been comprehensively improved, and it is equipped with native multimodal visual understanding capabilities, making it more powerful, faster, and lower-cost. It welcomes users to test and provide feedback. Ordinary users can directly converse via the web version and mobile apps, while developers can access APIs through the open platform, making it one of the Chinese large model options with outstanding cost-effectiveness currently. For ordinary users, the two built-in modes of deep thinking and intelligent search cover most daily usage scenarios. For developers, mathematical, coding, and reasoning tasks are the areas with the most prominent reputation and are worth evaluating first. The official research page also shows the continuous iteration context from V3, R1 to V4, V4.1, and the model's evolution rhythm is quite fast.

Who is it for?

Developers who need high-cost-performance Chinese large model APIs, researchers and teams who pay attention to cutting-edge open-source models, and individual users who want to experience a deep thinking dialogue assistant for free. For teams that are budget-sensitive but require strong reasoning capabilities, it is usually among the first batch of candidates included in evaluations; individual users can use the web version or mobile app as a daily Q&A tool with almost no usage barriers.

Key features

Conversation & Deep Thinking

The web version and mobile app support direct conversation, with a built-in deep thinking mode suitable for complex reasoning and long-range problems.

Intelligent Search

Answers time-sensitive questions by integrating retrieval, compensating for the limitations imposed by the model's knowledge cutoff. It combines search and dialogue, ensuring that responses are both contextually grounded and substantiated.

Native Multimodal Visual Understanding

The new-generation model features native visual understanding capabilities, enabling it to process image-related content and visual tasks.

Open API

The official open platform provides APIs, documentation and price descriptions, with easy access and a short path from registration to the first call.

Multi-device Product Formats

In addition to the web version, the official also offers products such as the mobile app and Harness. There are four available paths: web, mobile, API, and open source.

Open-source Models

Multiple generations of models such as V4 and R1 have open weights, allowing for self-deployment, fine-tuning, and research.

Harness Collaborative Tool

The official provides Harness for collaboration between models and tools, targeting agent-based applications.

Service Status Page

Allows you to check service availability at any time, facilitating the monitoring of online dependencies.

How to use DeepSeek

For daily Q&A and writing, just use the web version directly.
when integrating into products, first compare the costs and capabilities of different versions on the open platform before deciding which model to use.
When visual understanding is required, confirm that the selected model version indeed supports this capability to avoid capability mismatch after integration.
the service status page is worth bookmarking, which makes it convenient to quickly troubleshoot after accessing the production environment.
New versions are released frequently, so it is recommended to follow official updates and timely evaluate the changes in capabilities and costs brought about by the upgrade.

Things to know

The open-source version can be deployed independently, but its performance is related to scale, and there is a gap between the performance of local small-scale deployment and the official API.

The API has pricing and rate-limiting policies. Check the official pricing page and service status page before integration and estimate usage volume.

The model iterates rapidly. The capabilities and naming of each model version are subject to the current version on the official website. Pay attention to version differences when accessing it.

Conversation content may be used to improve the model, so please enter sensitive information with caution; the service status page can check availability, but responses may slow down during high-load periods, and a buffer should be reserved for the production environment.