Answering Everyone's Questions About DeepSeek 🧵 DeepSeek is a top Chinese AI company. It recently released its R1 model, a competitor to OpenAI’s o1 model capable of answering advanced scientific questions. In a week, DeepSeek shattered media narratives around AI, China, and open source. It went from a niche technical release on inauguration day to a national press cover story. Whenever conventional narratives are challenged, both hype and cope distort the truth. Here’s what we know about DeepSeek and what it means for sacred narratives. Introduction DeepSeek R1 is a “reasoning” model. What does that mean? It means that it modifies a base model, DeepSeek V3, to answer more difficult questions using a sequence of outputs called “Chain of Thought”. Many of DeepSeek’s most notable optimizations, around algorithm structure, memory management, and data type, occurred with the base model V3, released in December. V3 was competitive to Western base models, but R1 put DeepSeek into an exclusive club with OpenAI and Google, passing Meta, xAI, and Anthropic. OpenAI released the first “reasoning” model, o1, in September. DeepSeek is the third company to release this type of model, after OpenAI and Google. On many metrics, it surpasses Google’s “flash reasoning”.