Insights
DeepSeek: A New Competitor in the LLM Arena
The landscape of Large Language Models (LLMs) is rapidly evolving, with new players emerging to challenge the dominance of industry giants like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. One of these new platers is DeepSeek, an open-source LLM developed by the Chinese startup DeepSeek AI. But how does this new LLM compare to ChatGPT? What makes it stand out? And what might the future hold for this new competitor in the LLM arena?
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What is DeepSeek?
DeepSeek is an AI model focused on balancing power, efficiency and accessibility. Unlike many closed LLMs, DeepSeek embraces open-source principles, allowing developers and users to freely access and build upon its technology. Some key developments of DeepSeek are:
- Multilingual strength: DeepSeek is trained on large datasets in both English and Chinese, giving it strong bilingual capacities.
- Efficiency focused: The model is designed to run on less powerful hardware, making it more accessible to individuals or small businesses.
- Open-weight models: DeepSeek AI’s R1 model is fully open-source, including the code and trained model.
- Advanced reasoning: The R1 model prioritizes multi-step reasoning and problem-solving, mimicking the human thought process.
- Performance benchmarks: DeepSeek claims its model outperforms LLaMa-2 in coding, math and reasoning tasks and competes with GPT-3.5 in open-ended evaluations. However, evaluations against GPT-4 are still limited.
Despite being used by millions of daily users since its launch in January 2025, DeepSeek has also already faced some scrutiny over handling of its user data. Reports indicate that the platform collects extensive user information, including conversations, search history and uploaded files, which are stored on Chinese servers.
This has led to concerns about this kind of data being accessible by Chinese authorities. Warnings about sharing personal information have been issued by European authorities and the use of DeepSeek has been prohibited for several government workers.
DeepSeek vs ChatGPT
As DeepSeek enters the LLM market, it is positioning itself to compete with industry giants like ChatGPT, which has around 300 million weekly active users worldwide. While both models serve as powerful AI-driven assistants, their approaches and applications differ.
Accessibility and Openness
One of the most noticeable distinctions between the two models is their approach to openness and accessibility.
DeepSeek operates a fully open-source model (R1 model), making its code and trained model weights accessible to the public. This fosters innovation, encourages transparency and allows developers to modify the model in a way that suits their specific needs. ChatGPT remains a proprietary model. While it provides API access, the underlying architecture and training data remains closed.
Efficiency
In terms of efficiency, DeepSeek is designed to run on less powerful hardware, making it more accessible for individuals and small businesses that lack the resources for cloud-based AI solutions. In contrast, ChatGPT often requires significant computing resources to operate efficiently, making running the model locally impractical due to hardware demands.
Ecosystem
However, ChatGPT excels in its conversational fluency and contextual memory and can generate highly coherent and human-like responses. It also benefits from a well-established ecosystem, including API integrations, plugins and extensive developer support. DeepSeek is still developing its ecosystem, which means less immediate support.
Costs
Cost is another major differentiation. As an open-sourced model, DeepSeek is free to use. ChatGPT, however, follows a freemium model, where basic access is free, but advanced features and higher usage limits require a paid subscription.
Privacy and security
Despite the above features, DeepSeek’s privacy and security concerns pose a significant challenge. Recent reports have raised worry about its data collection practices. This has led to regulatory scrutiny and warnings to use the platform with caution. ChatGPT, while not free from these concerns, operates under tougher data protection policies, particularly for users in regions with stricter privacy laws like the EU.
What Is Next for DeepSeek?
DeepSeek has the potential to become a major player in the LLM and AI landscape. Its open-source nature fosters fast innovation, while its efficiency makes AI more accessible to a broader audience. If DeepSeek continues to evolve, it could create a niche as a cost-effective, open-source alternative for developers and other individuals looking for AI solutions outside of closed-system models.
However, it still faces challenges, including competition from industry leaders like ChatGPT, scalability concerns and the need for a sustainable business model. In addition, as AI regulations tighten globally, ensuring user data protection and ethical AI usage will be crucial for its long-term success.
Other Popular LLMs
DeepSeek will not only compete with ChatGPT, but also with several other leading LLMs that are shaping the AI landscape. Google’s Gemini has been advancing rapidly as well, with their latest version focusing on deep multimodal understanding. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s Claude models have gained attention for their focus on AI safety and reliability, using “constitutional AI” to align responses with ethical guidelines.
On the open-source front, Meta’s LLaMa models also continue to evolve. Their new model, LLaMa-3 will be aiming to match proprietary models in performance while remaining available to developers (under a commercial license).
With these players driving innovation at a quick pace, the LLM market is becoming increasingly competitive. DeepSeek will need to leverage its strengths in efficiency and openness while also addressing concerns about privacy and data security to be able to keep up.
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