DeepSeek

DeepSeek V3.2 is one of the leading open-source LLMs and a milestone for AI development outside the USA. With 671 billion parameters and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, it achieves 88.5% on the MMLU benchmark — directly on par with GPT-4o. What makes it special: DeepSeek is released under the MIT license, the most permissive open-source license available, with no commercial restrictions whatsoever.

DeepSeek's strengths lie in reasoning, coding and mathematics. The specialized reasoning model DeepSeek R1 uses chain-of-thought techniques and surpasses GPT-4o in certain logical tasks. Developed entirely in China, DeepSeek has geopolitical significance: it demonstrates that frontier AI no longer comes exclusively from Silicon Valley.

For enterprises, DeepSeek is particularly attractive due to its cost structure: the API is significantly cheaper than proprietary models like GPT-5.2 or Claude, with comparable quality for many tasks. And thanks to the MIT license, self-hosting via Hugging Face or Ollama is possible — ideal for privacy-critical applications where no data should flow to external APIs.

Compared to other open-source models like Llama 4 (stronger in multimodal and context) and Qwen3 (more efficient for multilingual), DeepSeek positions itself as the best all-rounder for text-based tasks at high volume.