DeepSeek

DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company based in Hangzhou that builds large language models and publishes many of them as open weights. People use its free chat assistant on the web and on mobile; developers call its models through a paid API or run the published models on their own servers. It drew worldwide attention in early 2025.

What DeepSeek offers

DeepSeek has three main products, all built on the same models:

• The chat assistant: a free conversational assistant on the web and in a mobile app, used for search, writing, reading documents, solving problems and translation. It works in Chinese and English.
• The API: a paid developer platform that gives access to DeepSeek’s current models. Its request format follows the conventions used by OpenAI’s API, so tools built for one can often switch to the other with small changes.
• Open-weight models: DeepSeek publishes the weights of many models, which anyone can download and run on their own hardware or cloud account.

DeepSeek models: V3, R1 and later versions

Two releases made DeepSeek known outside China. DeepSeek-V3, a general-purpose model, came out in December 2024. DeepSeek-R1, a reasoning model that works through a problem step by step before answering, followed in January 2025, with its weights published under the permissive MIT license. DeepSeek has released updated versions since then, and model names change quickly: the official API documentation lists the models available today.

What sets DeepSeek apart is less a single benchmark than its openness. A company can test the hosted assistant, move to the API, and later run the same family of models on its own servers if data rules require it.

Who uses DeepSeek

In China, DeepSeek is used by individuals for study and office work, and by companies that build it into their own products. Several Chinese cloud providers, including Alibaba Cloud, offer DeepSeek models on their platforms, so Chinese companies can use them without leaving their usual cloud. Outside China, developers and researchers use the open weights to build and test their own applications.

What a foreign company can do with DeepSeek

For a foreign company, DeepSeek is mostly a building block. Typical uses are:

• Customer service in Chinese: answering customer questions on a website, an app or a WeChat account, with a model that handles Chinese well.
• Document work: summarizing contracts, reports and regulations, or translating them between Chinese and English.
• Analysis: reading sales notes, customer feedback or support tickets and turning them into structured data for reports.
• Coding help: assisting developers with code generation and review.

Where the data goes is the first question to settle. DeepSeek’s privacy policy states that data sent to its own services is processed and stored in the People’s Republic of China. Running the open weights on your own servers keeps the data under your control. A public-facing generative AI service in mainland China must also follow the rules on generative AI services that Chinese regulators have applied since 2023. In practice, the value comes from connecting the model to the tools your team already uses, which is where our CRM and business intelligence solutions come in.

How DeepSeek compares with other Chinese AI platforms

DeepSeek is a model maker. Baidu AI is a full set of AI services tied to Baidu’s search engine and cloud. Tencent Hunyuan is built into Tencent’s apps and sold through Tencent Cloud. Coze, from ByteDance, is a no-code tool to build AI agents on top of models. A project can combine them: for example, a Coze agent or a custom application running on a DeepSeek model.

How QPSoftware can help

QPSoftware is a digital agency in Shanghai, working with foreign companies in China since 2009. As a CRM and BI agency in China, we connect models such as DeepSeek to your CRM, customer service and reporting tools, choose between the hosted API and self-hosting with you, and keep the integration maintainable.

Frequently Asked Questions