DeepSeek: The Chinese AI Powerhouse Disrupting the Industry

DeepSeek (深度求索) is revolutionizing the artificial intelligence landscape with its open-source large language models (LLMs).

Founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng and backed by the hedge fund High-Flyer, this Hangzhou-based company is setting new benchmarks for efficiency, affordability, and innovation in AI.

Disrupting AI Economics

DeepSeek-R1 delivers cutting-edge AI capabilities at a fraction of the cost of its Western counterparts.

While OpenAI’s GPT-4 cost approximately $100 million to train, DeepSeek-R1 was developed for just $6 million.

Even more impressively, it operates with only 10% of the computing power required by other LLMs, making it a game-changer in AI accessibility.

As the United States tightens sanctions on AI chip exports to China and India, DeepSeek has emerged as a resilient force, leveraging domestic innovation to overcome these restrictions.

Breaking Records with DeepSeek-R1

On January 10, 2025, DeepSeek launched its first free chatbot app, powered by DeepSeek-R1, for iOS and Android.

Within weeks, it became the most-downloaded free app on the iOS App Store in the United States, surpassing ChatGPT by January 27.

This seismic shift even triggered an 18% drop in Nvidia’s stock price, signaling DeepSeek’s growing influence in the global AI arms race.

Industry analysts have described DeepSeek’s rapid rise as “upending AI” and “ushering in a new era of AI brinkmanship.

An Open-Source Revolution

DeepSeek is fully committed to the open-source philosophy.

Unlike many competitors, the company makes its AI models, training data, and algorithms freely available.

This approach fosters global collaboration, accelerates AI research, and ensures transparency in model development.

Additionally, DeepSeek actively recruits top AI researchers from leading Chinese universities and even hires talent beyond the tech industry to diversify its knowledge base.

High-Flyer’s Fire-Flyer: The AI Supercomputing Backbone

DeepSeek’s success is powered by its high-performance computing clusters, Fire-Flyer (萤火一号) and Fire-Flyer 2 (萤火二号). Built with multi-billion yuan investments, these clusters handle massive-scale AI training workloads.

Fire-Flyer 2, launched in 2021, utilizes 5,000 PCIe A100 GPUs across 625 nodes.

It supports advanced AI training frameworks such as:

• 3FS (Fire-Flyer File System): A high-speed distributed file system optimized for random data reads.
• hfreduce: A custom-built asynchronous communication library that replaces Nvidia’s NCCL, improving training efficiency.
• HaiScale DDP: A parallel training system integrating multiple deep learning techniques, including Data Parallelism (DP) and Fully Sharded Data Parallel (FSDP).

This infrastructure enables DeepSeek to push the boundaries of AI development while maintaining cost efficiency.

DeepSeek-Coder: Redefining AI-Powered Coding

In November 2023, DeepSeek introduced DeepSeek-Coder, a powerful AI tool for software development.

It was released as an open-source project under the MIT License, ensuring free access for researchers and commercial users alike.

DeepSeek-Coder features eight models, each boasting a 16K context length, trained on 1.8 trillion tokens from diverse programming languages and related data sources.

It significantly enhances code generation, debugging, and AI-assisted software engineering.

DeepSeek-LLM: The Contender to Watch

One month after DeepSeek-Coder, the company launched DeepSeek-LLM, featuring 7B and 67B parameter models.

Designed to rival Meta’s Llama 2, it employs cutting-edge AI architectures such as:

• Pre-norm decoder-only Transformer with RMSNorm.
• SwiGLU-based feedforward layers for enhanced computational efficiency.
• Rotary positional embedding (RoPE) and grouped-query attention (GQA) for superior contextual understanding.

Training on two trillion tokens of English and Chinese text, DeepSeek-LLM outperformed most open-source AI models of its time.

DeepSeek-MoE: Smarter, More Efficient AI

On January 9, 2024, DeepSeek released DeepSeek-MoE, a 16B-parameter Mixture of Experts (MoE) model optimized for efficiency.

It selectively activates only 2.7B parameters per token, reducing computational overhead while maintaining high performance.

A novel shared and routed expert system prevents model inefficiencies by ensuring balanced expert utilization.

This allows DeepSeek-MoE to match the capabilities of larger non-MoE models while using fewer computational resources.

The Future of DeepSeek

With groundbreaking innovations in AI efficiency, affordability, and accessibility, DeepSeek is reshaping the global AI landscape.

By championing open-source development and pioneering new computing paradigms, the company is poised to challenge AI industry giants and redefine the future of artificial intelligence.

Expect DeepSeek to be at the forefront of AI’s next big leap.

DeepSeek Mastery: Unlock AI’s Full Potential

DeepSeek is rapidly transforming how individuals and businesses interact with AI.

Whether you want to automate tasks, generate high-quality content, analyze data, or even write code, mastering DeepSeek can give you a competitive edge in today’s digital world.

What You’ll Learn?

• Understand what DeepSeek is and why it’s a game-changer in the AI space.
• Learn how to ask DeepSeek basic questions and receive quick, informative responses.
• Master the art of crafting effective prompts to get accurate and useful AI-generated results.
• Utilize DeepSeek’s advanced search tool to find precise information across various sources.
• Discover how DeepSeek enhances coding by generating and improving code snippets in multiple programming languages.
• Explore DeepSeek’s reasoning capabilities to solve complex problems and make informed decisions.

Who This Course Is For?

• Beginners looking to explore AI tools.
• Business professionals aiming to streamline research, summarization, fact-checking, or document processing.
• AI enthusiasts interested in the latest advancements and applications of DeepSeek.

Requirements:

• Basic computer skills.
• No programming knowledge required.

Course Overview

This course is designed to help you unlock the full potential of DeepSeek, one of the most powerful AI tools available today.

Whether you’re a beginner or already familiar with AI, you’ll learn how to use DeepSeek effectively for content creation, workflow automation, and coding assistance.

We start with the basics—understanding the interface and experimenting with text prompts—before advancing to more complex applications.

You’ll explore document and image processing, AI-powered coding, and DeepSeek’s powerful search and reasoning capabilities.

As we progress, you’ll gain deep insights into prompt engineering, a crucial skill for maximizing AI efficiency.

Real-world case studies will illustrate how DeepSeek can be applied across industries, from marketing and content creation to customer service and data analysis.

By the end of this course, you’ll have the knowledge and skills to harness DeepSeek’s full power, making your work more efficient, creative, and productive.