Developed by a Chinese AI firm, DeepSeek is an open source AI model developed in very low cost and time. It has attracted global attention. Just because it was developed in less cost and less time does not mean that the model is without quality. DeepSeek has not only maintained performance but also efficiency and has achieved 90% savings according to OpenAI. The question that arises is whether a model developed in such a low cost will be successful in its work in the future. Is what we have thought is near?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is developing rapidly in every field in the world. It is revolutionizing the industry. It is creating new dimensions of technology. It is defining the way we interact with technology fields. If we look at it, it includes reasoning tools, large language models, creating creative content and empowering complex business applications. Platforms like OpenAI have been modernizing such fields for a long time. Meanwhile, the Chinese have brought a new revolution, which is named: DeepSeek.
In this article, we will learn about the origin of DeepSeek, what is and the differences between OpenAI vs DeepSeek. How does it stack up against the OpenAI o1 and o1 Pro models. So in this article, we will learn about the differences between the two. The computational power of OpenAI vs the elegant efficiency of the open source DeepSeek.
What is DeepSeek ?
DeepSeek Hangzhou, a company founded in May 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, a graduate of Zhejiang University, is an AI development firm based in China. Wenfeng was also a stock market trader. Wenfeng also co-founded the China-based quantitative hedge fund Hi-Flyer. He focused on AI research development part-time along with all those jobs and founded DeepSeek. This is an open source model. However, its development funding and valuation have not been publicly disclosed.
DeepSeek had previously created a model in 2023. The company focuses on developing open source LLM. The company has created different variations on its original LLM several times. However, the company did not gain fame until January 2025 before releasing its OpenSource DeepSeek model. It suddenly surprised the world as soon as the application was launched.
The company provides multiple services for its models, including a web interface, mobile application and API access.
DeepSeek-R1. Open Source Model Released in January 2025, this model is based on DeepSeek-V3. The model has 671 billion parameters and 128,000 reference length. This model has been built at a much lower cost than OpenAI. It is going to face a lot of competition in the coming days. So today in this article we will see the differences between the two.
Differences : OpenAI vs DeepSeek
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Founding Year
Accessibility
Headquarters
Training approach
Architecture
Development focus
Key models
Development cost
Specialized models
Multilingual
Open source policy
Performance
API prise
(per million)
Ethical oversight
OpenAI
2015
closed-source, API- dependent
San Francisco, Calif.
Supervised and instruction-based fine-tuning
Dense transformer
Broad AI capabilities
GPT-4o, o1
~$100M+
Dall-E (image generation),
Whisper (speech recognition)
50+languages , global leader
Limited
General-purpose, high-complexity
o1: $15 (input), $60 (output)
proprietary transparency
DeepSeek
2023
open-source, local development
Hangzhou, China
Reinforcement learning
Mixture-of-Experts
Efficient,
open source models
DeepSeek-V3, & DS-R1
~$5.58M+
R1 Coder (coding), Janus Pro (vision model)
Strong in chinese, growing
Mostly open source
fast, domain-specialized
R1: $0.55 (input), $2.19 (output)
Open-source detabases, privacy concerns
What in the future
Both companies are excellent in their own way. Both companies can focus on improving the efficiency, explain ability and safety of their models. This is capable of revolutionizing any field like medical, technology, automation, linguistic, images, audio etc. Apart from this, addressing ethical concerns related to bias, fairness and potential misuse of AI will be important for both companies.
Both companies are developing new capabilities. Everyone will forever be keeping an eye on their profits and losses. It’s important to remember that the field of AI is evolving at an incredibly fast pace.
