DeepSeek vs OpenAI
October 01, 2025
DeepSeek and OpenAI are both startups developing large language models for text generation, question answering, code generation and problem solving. Based on their models, they provide web services and mobile apps with chatbots, as well as APIs for integrating AI into third-party systems. They use transformer-based architectures with attention mechanisms and tokenization, traine models on massive text datasets covering various languages, domains, code and mathematics. Both companies employ reinforcement learning and human feedback for censorship, ethics and security. They also develop technologies to optimize model performance relative to energy consumption.
But DeepSeek (founded in 2023) is a Chinese company that grew out of a hedge fund. It creates open-source models known for their cost-efficiency. The company uses technologies such as "mixture of experts" and training on distilled data (from OpenAI's models) to reduce training costs. At the same time, their models are comparable in results to OpenAI models, particularly in mathematics and reasoning tasks. DeepSeek models are also known for their restrictions and censorship of responses to topics, politically sensitive in China.
OpenAI (2015) is an American company, the creator of ChatGPT, that founded as a non-profit but later transfered to commercial format and partnered with Microsoft. It uses supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback to improve response quality and intent-matching. In addition to LLM, the company develops generative models for images, videos and multimodal worlds. OpenAI has own large computing infrastructure and uses third-party cloud providers (e.g., Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud). It focuses on security (content control, ethic filters) and transparency of sourcing training data (at least compared to DeepSeek).
But DeepSeek (founded in 2023) is a Chinese company that grew out of a hedge fund. It creates open-source models known for their cost-efficiency. The company uses technologies such as "mixture of experts" and training on distilled data (from OpenAI's models) to reduce training costs. At the same time, their models are comparable in results to OpenAI models, particularly in mathematics and reasoning tasks. DeepSeek models are also known for their restrictions and censorship of responses to topics, politically sensitive in China.
OpenAI (2015) is an American company, the creator of ChatGPT, that founded as a non-profit but later transfered to commercial format and partnered with Microsoft. It uses supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback to improve response quality and intent-matching. In addition to LLM, the company develops generative models for images, videos and multimodal worlds. OpenAI has own large computing infrastructure and uses third-party cloud providers (e.g., Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud). It focuses on security (content control, ethic filters) and transparency of sourcing training data (at least compared to DeepSeek).
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