DeepSeek

DeepSeek produces open-source language models that punch far above their weight class. DeepSeek-R1 is a reasoning model that competes with OpenAI's o1 on math, code, and science benchmarks while being fully open-weight and dramatically cheaper to run. DeepSeek-V3 handles general tasks with performance comparable to GPT-4 at a fraction of the cost. The models use mixture-of-experts architecture, which keeps inference costs low despite their large total parameter counts. You can run them locally via Ollama, access them through their own API, or use them on OpenRouter. For developers building cost-sensitive AI applications or teams that need to self-host, DeepSeek models offer the best performance-per-dollar ratio available today.