DeepSeek
FreeChinese AI lab whose free chat rattled the industry — frontier-class V3 and R1 reasoning models, with visible chain-of-thought and web search, at no cost in the browser.
Why we recommend DeepSeek
DeepSeek made AI history in January 2025 when its R1 reasoning model matched products costing $20/month — for free, with open weights, trained at a fraction of the assumed cost, briefly wiping hundreds of billions off US chip stocks. The chat at chat.deepseek.com remains remarkable: R1 shows its full chain-of-thought as it reasons, which is both useful and genuinely educational. Is it free? Yes — the web chat is free without usage tiers; the company monetises its API, not the chat interface.
Best use cases
How to use it: open chat.deepseek.com, create a free account (email or Google), and chat — toggle 'DeepThink' to route your prompt to the reasoning model and watch it think, or enable web search for current information. Nothing to install; it runs in any browser (no PWA manifest, so use a browser shortcut if you want an app feel). Best for hard math and code problems where visible reasoning helps you verify the answer, and for studying how reasoning models actually work.
Honest limitations
Does it work offline? Not the website — chat is server-side; the open-weights models can be run locally by enthusiasts with serious hardware, which is a different exercise entirely. The hosted service applies Chinese content-policy filtering on sensitive political topics, data is processed under Chinese jurisdiction — a dealbreaker for some workplaces — and peak-hour capacity issues still cause 'server busy' errors.
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