China’s AI scene is buzzing with excitement over DeepSeek AI, a company rapidly making waves in the global race for innovation. Its highly-capable chatbots have captured attention on both Wall Street and tech circles. This Chinese AI lab has garnered international recognition by exceeding expectations with its groundbreaking technology. The story of DeepSeek begins with High-Flyer Capital Management, a prominent quantitative hedge fund that leverages AI to make trading decisions. Co-founded in 2015 by the passionate AI enthusiast Liang Wenfeng, High-flyer launched as a hedge fund in 2019 and later transitioned into a dedicated AI research lab named DeepSeek. This separation allowed for deeper focus on AI development, ultimately leading to DeepSeek’s successful launch as an independent company. However, like other AI companies based in China, DeepSeek has faced hurdles due to US export restrictions on hardware, requiring the use of less powerful chips such as Nvidia H800 compared to their American counterparts. 2023 marked a turning point for DeepSeek with its initial suite of AI models, including DeepSeek Coder, DeepSeek LLM, and DeepSeek Chat. The release of the DeepSeek-V2 family of models truly catapulted the company into global prominence. DeepSeek-V2’s ability to analyze text and images performed exceptionally well in benchmark tests, forcing competitors like ByteDance and Alibaba to decrease their model pricing. Subsequent advancements with DeepSeek-V3 in December 2024 and the reasoning model DeepSeek R1 in January 2025 further solidified DeepSeek’s position as a leader. These models have reportedly surpassed leading competitors like Meta’s Llama and OpenAI’s GPT-4 in internal tests, showcasing DeepSeek’s technical prowess.