DeepSeek (Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence) · Coding · Chatbot · China AI
DeepSeek is a free AI assistant from DeepSeek that runs on its open-source V4 model family. It handles chat, reasoning, coding and long documents across web, app and API.
DeepSeek is an AI assistant you use through a chat window, whether in the browser, on your phone or through the API. It answers questions, reasons through problems step by step, writes and fixes code, and reads very long documents in one go. The engine behind it is the DeepSeek V4 model family, which DeepSeek released as open-source weights, so anyone can inspect it, run it or build on it.
The pitch is capability at a low price. DeepSeek pairs a large mixture-of-experts design with a 1M-token context window, which means it can keep a whole codebase, report or book in view without you pasting it in pieces. For everyday questions it answers in seconds, and for harder ones it can switch into a thinking mode that shows its reasoning before the final reply.
The limits are worth knowing up front. DeepSeek is a text-first assistant, and vision support sits only on the lighter Flash model, not on the top V4-Pro tier. The web and app are free to use but do see demand spikes, and the API is metered, so heavy use carries a bill. It also has no image or video generation, so it stays a language tool rather than a full creative suite.
A quick look at DeepSeek - AI Assistant's pricing, supported platforms, and performance.
The users, tasks, and scenarios where this tool fits best.
DeepSeek V4 ships as open weights, so you can read the technical report, run the models yourself or fine-tune them. The family covers a heavyweight Pro model and a lighter Flash model, both built on a mixture-of-experts design so only a slice of the parameters runs per token. That choice keeps inference cost down while the model still draws on a very large pool of knowledge.
Both V4 models accept up to 1 million tokens of context and can produce up to 384K tokens in a reply. In practice, that means you can hand over an entire codebase, a long report or a stack of documents and ask questions that need the whole picture. DeepSeek reports that on 1M-token inputs the Pro model uses a fraction of the compute and memory of its previous generation, which is what makes the long window practical rather than just a demo.
DeepSeek can answer quickly or reason first, and you choose per request. Thinking mode is the default on the API, and you can dial the effort up or down; non-thinking mode skips the reasoning trace for fast, cheap replies. The visible reasoning steps help on math, logic and coding, where a wrong turn early usually means a wrong answer later.
The V4 models are tuned for code and tool use, with support for tool calls, JSON output and a Responses-style API. DeepSeek built its training around agent tasks, and it lists the models as usable behind popular coding assistants without extra glue. For developers, this turns the assistant into something you can wire into a workflow, not just a chat window.
The DeepSeek assistant is free to use on the web and in the iOS and Android apps, with no subscription and no seat count. You get the current model, the thinking toggle and long-document handling at no cost. The trade-off is that free access can slow down when demand spikes, since everyone shares the same pool.
The API follows the OpenAI and Anthropic formats, so existing SDKs and tools work by changing the base URL to api.deepseek.com. It supports streaming, tool calls, JSON output and cache pricing that cuts the cost of repeated input. Off-peak hours run at half the peak rate, which rewards batch work that can wait.
DeepSeek is an AI assistant built by the company DeepSeek that runs on its open-source V4 models. You use it to chat, reason through problems, write and debug code and read long documents, either in the free web and mobile app or through a paid API.
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