DeepSeek

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI lab that shocked the AI world with DeepSeek-R1, an open-source reasoning model trained at a fraction of the cost of comparable US models. DeepSeek-V3 rivals GPT-4o on major benchmarks and is available for free via their chat interface. Their distilled R1 models can run on consumer hardware. The API is among the cheapest available for frontier-quality inference, making DeepSeek a compelling choice for high-volume applications.