The questions people search most about DeepSeek, answered in plain English and kept current. Facts checked against official sources in November 2026.
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI lab that became famous in January 2025 by releasing models matching frontier performance at a fraction of the cost. It offers a free chatbot app and web chat, a cheap API, and - unusually - open model weights anyone can download and run.
Yes, the app and website are free. API usage is metered per token at prices far below most competitors. Running the open weights yourself costs nothing in licence fees - just your own hardware and power.
For the hosted app, the key fact is jurisdiction: prompts go to servers in China and data is handled under Chinese law, so keep personal, client and commercially sensitive information out of it - the eSafety Commissioner's DeepSeek guide says the same. Self-hosting the open weights changes the picture entirely: your data never leaves your machines.
It showed that frontier-class AI could be trained for millions rather than billions of dollars, then gave the weights away. That pressured every major lab on price and kicked off the current wave of efficient, open models.
R1 is DeepSeek's reasoning model, released January 2025. It thinks step by step - visibly - before answering, which lifts maths, logic and coding results. The R1 release also included smaller distilled versions that run on ordinary hardware.
Yes. Because the weights are open, tools like Ollama or LM Studio can run distilled DeepSeek models on a workstation with no internet connection required for inference. This is the basis of private, sovereign AI deployments for businesses.
DeepSeek competes on reasoning and coding benchmarks at a far lower price, with open weights. ChatGPT is the more complete product: apps, memory, integrations and business controls. The hosted DeepSeek app also censors some politically sensitive topics; self-hosted weights do not carry those restrictions.
If you want capable AI at low cost with full data control, self-hosted DeepSeek-class models are a strong option. If you just want a free chatbot for general questions, the app works - just keep sensitive data out of it. ITIMPRESS helps Australian businesses deploy private AI on this pattern.
The current lineup (November 2026) pairs fast, low-cost deepseek-flash models with the V4 Pro series for heavier reasoning and coding. V5 is anticipated but unannounced, so treat release-date speculation as rumour.
Its weights are openly released, which enables self-hosting and private deployments. Strictly speaking that is open-weight rather than full open source - training data and complete training code remain unpublished.
No. The latest DeepSeek release is V4.1-Flash-1017 from 17 October 2026, an MIT-weighted update available on the website, app, API and gateways such as Vercel AI Gateway.
