D
DeepSeek
Chinese open-weight frontier models
paidPay per token (cheap)Open Source
DeepSeek R1 is an open-weight reasoning model competitive with OpenAI's o1, at a fraction of the price. DeepSeek V3 is a strong general-purpose LLM.
Pros
- Frontier reasoning at ~5% of OpenAI prices
- Open weights — can self-host
- Very competitive benchmarks
Cons
- China-based (geopolitical/compliance concerns for some)
- No vision yet
- Smaller SDK ecosystem