China's DeepSeek just dropped a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

Hands on Chinese AI startup DeepSeek this week unveiled a family of LLMs it claims not only replicates OpenAI's o1 reasoning capabilities, but challenges the American model builder's dominance in a whole host of benchmarks.

Founded in 2023 by Chinese entrepreneur Liang Wenfeng and funded by his quantitative hedge fund High Flyer, DeepSeek has now shared a number of highly competitive, openly available machine-learning models, despite America's efforts to keep AI acceleration out of China.

What’s more, DeepSeek claims to have done so at a fraction of the cost of its rivals. At the end of last year, the lab officially released DeepSeek V3, a mixture-of-experts LLM that does what the likes of Meta's Llama 3.1, OpenAI's GPT-4o, and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet can do. Now it's released R1, a reasoning model fine-tuned from V3.

While big names in the ...