What is DeepSeek? Everything a marketer needs to know

Just over a year after being launched, DeepSeek has claimed its place as a key player in the AI Large Language Model (LLM) landscape. And while it is still relatively new in the field, it can refine your marketing tasks.

The following article from WebFX explores everything a digital marketer needs to know about DeepSeek:

What is DeepSeek?

DeepSeek is an artificial intelligence company that develops various large language models trained for specific tasks such as software development, general reasoning, and real-time problem-solving.

The history of DeepSeek

Liang Wenfeng built DeepSeek out of his hedge fund-owned AI lab. Liang Wenfeng comes from a background in quantitative finance merged with AI.

Here is the timeline for how DeepSeek came to be:

Since its inception, DeepSeek has released multiple models and variants, including Base and Chat. Licensing may vary by release, so users should verify each model individually. For image-related use cases, DeepSeek has also released Janus-Pro-7B.

If you're using DeepSeek V3.0 for web development or game development, the new version will deliver better web page design and front-end design for games. Function calls are also more accurate.

Comparing DeepSeek against other AI models, you can start with its training factors.

While DeepSeek engineers were able to train their model for much less than its competitor, OpenAI, the training cost remained low due to its parent company's prior hardware investments. The training cost also doesn't include data acquisition, data cleaning, and processing fees, as well as staff salaries.

Meanwhile, their novel use of reinforcement learning instead of supervised fine-tuning makes it an LLM capable of improving on its own. It also demonstrated significant numbers in terms of hardware spending.

Its input and output usage costs also make it cost-effective for enterprise customers.

Due to this, the premium model's pricing is lower than GPT-4o.

DeepSeek-R1 test and results

When DeepSeek released its Base and Chat models along with their research results, the AI industry observed when they saw R1 performing better by a margin, if not outperformed, other models such as Claude-3.5, GPT-4o, OpenAI o1-mini, and o1-1217 on various knowledge benchmarks.

They specifically beat the other models in terms of education-oriented and other intelligence benchmarks with the model's ability to answer STEM questions.

Based on its FRAMES result which tests for document analysis ability, DeepSeek R1 has beaten Claude-3.5, GPT-4o, DeepSeek V3, and OpenAI o1-models.

While it still performs decently for fact-based queries for the SimpleQA benchmark, the information it provides can be limited.

Chatbot Arena results

UC Berkeley Skylab and LMArena developed Chatbot Arena, an open platform for AI benchmarking. They rank LLM and AI chatbots using the Bradley-Terry model.

Below are DeepSeek's results with the Chatbot Arena ranking criteria.

Overall ranking

DeepSeek continues to stand out on the overall leaderboard with multiple models in the rankings. This demonstrates its versatility and continued role in the broader AI model landscape.

Below, you will find how DeepSeek ranks against other LLMs based on how it performs in terms of:

• Language (by tasks)
• Language fluency
• Web development

These tasks are some of the most frequent use cases digital marketers have for LLMs like DeepSeek V3 and DeepSeek R1.

Language (by tasks)

DeepSeek-V3 ranks first for coding and multi-turn. DeepSeek-V3 also ranks second, along with R1, for hard prompts with style control and math.

DeepSeek V3 has beaten R1 in producing creative writing outputs, longer query, hard prompts, and overall ranking.

Language (by language fluency)

In terms of language fluency, DeepSeek-V3 ranks first in two languages-German and French.

Meanwhile, R1 only shares the top spot for French, but ranks second for Spanish and Korean.

However, both models need work in English. Overall, V3 is more fluent in languages than R1.

Web development

DeepSeek R1 beats most LLMs, even OpenAI's o3, when it comes to web development. This means the model can produce good-quality code against fellow LLMs.

Humanity's Last Exam

If the Turing test had a computer make humans believe they were talking to another human instead of a computer, Humanity's Last Exam (HLE) is a test of whether the best LLMs out there are capable of solving humanity's hardest academic problems.

HLE is a set of advanced problems that the advanced academic levels can expect on a doctorate level. The questions have been fed first to leading LLM models.

If the question was unanswerable, it was then vetted, refined, and answered by human reviewers - meaning it's answerable by human beings.

However, that's not the present case with major LLMs. Based on the latest HLE results, while R1 has managed a high accuracy (on a text-only subset), its calibration error, or confidence level, about the correctness of its answer is the lowest among the other models.

Should you use DeepSeek?

Yes, DeepSeek can be a helpful tool for marketing and research that anyone can use. However, remember that any prompt and output may be used as part of its training data.

To learn more, let's look at these usage factors:

Accuracy

Based on the benchmarks DeepSeek has passed, it is capable of aiding your marketing projects. If it will be used for hard prompts with style control, then DeepSeek can help with content ideation, brainstorming, chatting, and answering questions.

Ease of access

Through DeepSeek's API, marketing developers can easily integrate it into the applications and platforms they handle. After integration, a marketer can use DeepSeek capabilities to create chatbots and recommendation engines.

Its Janus Pro 7 can also be used to generate images for marketing campaign assets.

Cloud services providers NxtGen and Microsoft Azure already offer DeepSeek R1.

Cost vs. value

Being an open-source tool released under MIT license, DeepSeek is competitive when it comes to cost.

Input Cost

In terms of cost, DeepSeek is currently positioned in the middle of the market, with input costs as low as $0.55 and $0.27 for DeepSeek R1 and V3, respectively.

Output Cost

The same goes for their output cost, with $2.19 for DeepSeek R1 and $1.10 for V3.

DeepSeek real-world applications: Who uses DeepSeek?

Since its launch, DeepSeek has shown its effectiveness in a wide range of real-world applications. Who uses DeepSeek today? And for what purpose? Here are some high-profile users and where the technology has been applied to:

Government

Though largely local Chinese governments in Shenzhen and Kunshan, DeepSeek, being fluent in Mandarin, has helped government workers draft and proofread their documents, sometimes as many as 1,000 characters, in just a few seconds. It has also helped authorities locate missing people.

Industry partnership

Microsoft, despite being a major investor in OpenAI, quickly embraced the arrival of DeepSeek and offered it on Azure. This allows software developers, especially marketing developers, to easily integrate and develop AI apps for their marketing tasks.

DeepSeek is also available for installation on NxtGen, AWS, and Nvidia AI platforms.

Car manufacturers

Chinese car manufacturers such as BYD, Geely, and Great Wall have announced they have installed DeepSeek. BYD has reported it will use DeepSeek's "God's eye" capabilities to boost its cars' self-driving technology.

Meanwhile, SAIC-GM will also integrate it into its Buick and Cadillac cars.

Telecommunications

Telco companies such as China Mobile and China Telecom are also eager to onboard DeepSeek.

Search engine

Like its Western counterparts Google and Bing, Baidu has integrated and harnessed DeepSeek's AI technology to help with search and cloud services. DeepSeek now helps refine search result relevance and improve understanding of users' natural language. This makes search results address the search intent better and aids chatbots in providing more accurate replies.

Gaming industry

NetEase has integrated DeepSeek to provide better-crafted non-player characters (NPCs). AI also helps in updating storylines in real time to give a player a personalized playing experience. This makes gaming a personalized experience for players.

Chatbots

DeepSeek AI will be available for integration into Meta's WhatsApp worldwide.

You can also forward WhatsApp messages to DeepSeek via a third-party automation platform for analysis and response automation. It can also be integrated with Telegram through its GPTBots agent.

DeepSeek use cases for marketing

Here are some DeepSeek use cases for marketing:

1. Content creation

Using its Mixture of Experts training dataset and passing multiple academic benchmarks, DeepSeek can provide industry-specific insights. R1 can generate marketing content like blog posts, social media content, or email copy in seconds.

Case in point, Chinese government workers let DeepSeek draft and proofread their work with over a thousand characters in under a minute.

2. Customer support via chatbots

R1 and V3-0324 rank 2nd in hard prompts with style control which shows their capability to provide accurate answers. The DeepSeek Chat model is purposefully built to provide any business with a chatbot whose reasoning capabilities just get better with every customer it serves. Its natural language processing also helps it adapt its tone and voice to sound more like a human.

3. Personalized marketing

AI-driven personalization allows businesses to personalize content and offers in real time. DeepSeek builds on this capability with its R1 model, which uses reinforcement learning to continuously improve how it interprets data and generates responses.

4. SEO and keyword research

Baidu utilizes DeepSeek to help address user intent. DeepSeek's ability to understand the nuances of every search helps it faster categorize which results resonate with the searcher's goal. It can also detect patterns in how search engines are ranking their results and help marketers refine their pages to gain better search rankings through AI SEO.

5. Market research and sentiment analysis

Similar to LLMs such as Grok and o1 models, DeepSeek can generate synthetic respondents, helping marketers do deeper market research testing faster.

If it is trained on your historical data, it can also perform predictive analysis to provide future scenarios.

Real-time monitoring of customer sentiments can also help your business be more agile in responding to market trends and customer issues.

6. Web development

DeepSeek has shown capabilities in web development. This can be cost-effective in terms of time and effort when developing landing pages, microsites, or other temporary web assets.

7. Product launches

Based on your historical marketing data, DeepSeek can identify product strategies and timings for product launches. DeepSeek can notice gaps in the market and help marketers on how to address the gap with their product. It can also provide insights on when and how to launch your product.

DeepSeek Limitations

Powerful as it may be, DeepSeek R-1 and V3-0324 have computing limitations just like any other LLM out there. These include, but are not limited to:

Language mixing

Currently, DeepSeek R-1 remains one of the few LLMs out there trained in different languages. And while it ranks first in foreign languages like French, it still needs work on its English output.

There have also been instances where R1 mixes languages-reasoning, and answering in English even when queried using a different language.

Prompt structure

Prompting is key to maximizing an LLM's reasoning capabilities. And for R1 and V3.0324, researchers found that short prompts tend to make DeepSeek deliver low-quality outputs in the long run. They recommend users employ a clear statement of the problem and specify the output result format when prompting for better results.

AI biases

Just like other LLMs, DeepSeek is also prone to AI biases. Any LLM output will always depend on the quality of its training dataset. And even with DeepSeek's powerful reasoning capabilities, it still has things it cannot answer because it is beyond its scope.

Censorship

Since its release, DeepSeek has been criticized for censorship or answering some questions critical of the Chinese government, and its actions are beyond its scope.

Aside from strong censorship, governments have also raised concerns about its threat to data privacy. In response, the U.S. Congress has filed a bipartisan bill to ban its use on government-issued devices. States like New York, Texas, and Virginia have also banned it.

Idiot-savant: DeepSeek and other LLMs

If there's one thing that can relieve human anxiety about DeepSeek and most major LLMs, it is that these models can still be considered idiot-savants.

They may show computing prowess in answering high-level questions in STEM, software engineering, language, and philosophical queries, but they still stumble upon basic arithmetic and obvious questions that a human with average intelligence can answer.

The dataset largely limits their world knowledge. Sometimes, when prompted with a difficult question, they lack guardrails of knowing when to confess they don't know the answer and hallucinate instead. It may sound correct, but it can turn out completely wrong.

This story was produced by WebFX and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.

Copyright 2026 Stacker Media, LLC

This story was originally published May 14, 2026 at 9:30 AM.