DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company that builds models close to the best, like ChatGPT or Claude, and publishes the blueprints for free. Their R1 model, released in January 2025, shocked the world: the app became #1 on the US App Store and triggered a sell-off in tech stocks. In 2026, DeepSeek released the V4 generation in April, then V4.1-Flash in September, which reads the equivalent of thousands of pages at once and understands images too.