https://chat.deepseek.com/sign_in is the official online gateway of DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based Chinese AI startup founded in July 2023. As a prominent platform focusing on open-source large language models (LLMs), it showcases the company’s cutting-edge AI innovations that challenge industry giants with high performance at ultra-low costs. The website serves a diverse user base including everyday users, developers, researchers, and enterprises, offering easy access to powerful AI tools, model resources, and technical support, all while adhering to a user-centric design philosophy.
The website highlights a series of high-performance models tailored to different scenarios, which have gained global recognition for their cost-efficiency and powerful capabilities:
- DeepSeek-R1: A specialized reasoning model that skyrocketed DeepSeek to international fame after its release in January 2025. It achieves performance comparable to OpenAI’s o1 series but at a fraction of the cost—with input costs per million tokens as low as $0.55 and output costs at $2, far below OpenAI’s pricing. Unlike traditional models relying on supervised fine-tuning, it evolves complex reasoning abilities like reflection and long-chain thinking through reinforcement learning, making it ideal for tackling intricate academic problems, technical research, and strategic decision-making.
- DeepSeek-V3 & V3.1: Flagship general-purpose models adept at natural language understanding and generation. These models support diverse tasks such as conversational AI, content creation, and data analysis, with V3.1 further optimizing performance and cost-effectiveness for widespread application among individual and business users.
- Specialized Models: The website also features niche models like DeepSeek-Coder, which excels at code writing, debugging, and explanation across multiple programming languages. There is also DeepSeek-VL, a vision-language model capable of handling multimodal tasks combining text and images, along with Janus Pro, a dedicated vision model expanding the platform’s creative and analytical capabilities.
The website provides intuitive and practical functional modules, enabling users to leverage AI capabilities without complex operations:
- Multi-Mode Chat Interface: The core chat function offers three selectable modes—Basic Model, Deep Thinking (powered by R1), and Web Search. The Web Search mode uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to integrate real-time web data, ensuring responses are timely and accurate, suitable for tasks like tracking industry trends or planning travel itineraries.
- Free and Open Access: Most core functions are available for free to users. Additionally, the website guides developers to access open-source model codes on platforms like Hugging Face and GitHub, promoting transparency and community collaboration.
- Versatile Practical Tools: It supports various daily and professional tasks, including generating articles, summarizing long documents, creating study plans, and designing code solutions. Users can input prompts in natural language to obtain tailored results efficiently.
- Convenient Account Access: Users can register and log in via email, Google account, or Chinese mainland phone number, ensuring a smooth and secure login experience for global users.
Beyond end-user tools, the website serves as a hub for developer resources to facilitate integration and secondary development:
- API Integration Support: It provides clear API endpoints and technical documentation, allowing developers to integrate DeepSeek models into their own applications, software, or systems. Compatibility with the Hugging Face Transformers library simplifies the development process for programmers using common frameworks.
- Scalable Model Options: The platform offers models ranging from 1.3B to 67B parameters. Developers can choose models of different sizes based on their application scenarios and hardware conditions, balancing performance and deployment costs for both lightweight mobile apps and large-scale enterprise systems.
- Community Collaboration Hub: By linking to open-source communities, the website encourages developers to share modified model versions, code samples, and application cases, fostering a collaborative ecosystem that accelerates the iteration and innovation of AI applications.
The website implicitly emphasizes DeepSeek’s disruptive role in the global AI industry. It highlights how the company developed top-tier models with only about $6 million in computing costs and 2,000 chips, challenging the notion that only tech giants can develop cutting-edge AI. The open-source nature of its models has won acclaim from the global tech community, with prominent figures like a16z founder Marc Andreessen praising DeepSeek-R1 as an "amazing breakthrough and a gift to the world". For users and developers seeking high-performance, cost-effective, and open AI solutions, deep-seek.ai has become an indispensable go-to platform.
