First of all, DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company founded in July 2023 by billionaire Liang Wenfeng, who graduated from Zhejiang University, one of China's top universities.
Second, DeepSeek is an open-source large language model that relies on what is known as "inference-time computing," which in simple terms means that for each query only the most relevant portions of the model are activated, not all of them at once, making the model very fast and cost-effective.
Finally, DeepSeek is a chatbot based on that language model. One of the finest chatbots in the world, in fact.