DeepSeek has been publishing research and releasing model weights for months, following a path similar to Meta's LLaMA model, unlike other major AI labs that keep their weights closed.

DeepSeek's model R1 is freely accessible through their website and app, allowing users to download, run locally, and customize it, which contributes to its hype cycle.

DeepSeek's reasoning model was released for free at scale, contrasting with other models that required paid subscriptions, which contributed to its rapid adoption.

DeepSeek's permissive open-source license is expected to lead to widespread adoption and proliferation of its model.

DeepSeek's rise in the open-source community is due to its strong reasoning model and user experience innovations that allow users to see the model's thought process, which had not been achieved before, and the 'DeepSeek moment' disrupted the market by providing a transparent and open-source approach that resonated with the community.

DeepSeek's model architecture innovations, such as multi-head latent attention, dramatically reduce memory pressure, making their models more efficient.

DeepSeek's V3 model, released in December, is a general-purpose model that performs comparably to other leading models like OpenAI's GPT-4 and Anthropic's Claude 3.5.

The DeepSeek-R1 model has a permissive MIT license, allowing unrestricted commercial use and the ability to create synthetic data from its outputs.

DeepSeek's recent models, including V3, highlight the importance of balancing training and inference compute resources to optimize performance and efficiency.