In 2022, we witnessed the release of ChatGPT, an AI innovation of such proportions that many compared it to significant historical events like the birth of the internet itself. As we outlined in our extensive overview of its capabilities, it can absolutely revolutionize your social media marketing by letting you:

- Generate content ideas

- Produce unique and engaging content

- Boost your conversion rates

- Get access to top-notch advice

- Optimize your posts

- and much, much more.

This opened the floodgates to a true AI revolution on multiple fronts, but not only in terms of ChatGPT clones. We’re talking specialized AI models specifically trained to excel in certain areas like video creation, process automation, voice generation, research, you name it. While not each and every one of these turned out to be revolutionary, the overall contribution to the world of AI as represented by the most notable contenders was significant, effectively pushing the limits of what’s achievable.

ChatGPT as people’s go-to AI companion

Still, for all but your most specific needs, ChatGPT reigned supreme. Think of it like what Bitcoin represents in the world of cryptocurrencies. Whether it be due to pioneering the concept or the vast marketing budget behind its inception, it’s the go-to platform most people think of upon hearing the word ‘AI’. At least until now. As you probably know already, ChatGPT has a free version with rather impressive capacities and a paid one that will set you back $20 per month to unlock its most advanced models and features.

Enter DeepSeek

Seemingly out of nowhere, DeepSeek appeared to give ChatGPT a run for its money, developed by a company with only a fraction of its funding. It can do everything the paid version of ChatGPT does for, well, absolutely free. No hidden fees, no weird surprises, just pop in an email address and you’re good to go. Best of all, it’s open-source, meaning you can easily run it locally on your device. And that means almost any device; certainly something as minimalistic as a Raspberry Pi, perhaps even a modern toaster due to how resource-efficient it is.

How DeepSeek stands out from the AI crowd

It comes as no surprise that each and every AI model tends to be stronger in certain aspects and weaker in others. But for any new contender to make a dent in the world of AI, it simply needs to be better, at least in some ways, otherwise there’s hardly a reason to be using it. In its current iteration, we can already say that DeepSeek shines in the following areas:

- Deep research (hence the name). Compared to ChatGPT and other AI alternatives, it can do a better job at providing answers to technical and niche-specific questions that require the expertise of a trained professional to answer. Think accounting, coding, engineering and finance.

- Proficient in multiple languages. While you could argue that ChatGPT is already amazing at what it does, well, it’s not quite as rosy when it comes to its capacity to translate content into different languages (hence, this is why real flesh-and-bone translators are still around). Reportedly, DeepSeek can formulate sentences in Chinese that are on the same level of proficiency as those formulated in English.

- Government compliant. Since ChatGPT doesn’t meet certain censorship criteria, the Chinese government has decided to block it. DeepSeek, on the other hand, passes their criteria, and already plays a significant role in their digital landscape (think services like WeChat, Baidu, and Alibaba).

In addition, while ChatGPT focuses on creative content generation, DeepSeek is geared towards technical analysis. It also beats it when it comes to research. At the same time, it happens to be a better translator.

Get API access for peanuts

If you’re a tech whiz or a developer who has the skills to put an API to a good use, you’ll want to hear this: DeepSeek’s API is roughly 27-times cheaper than that of ChatGPT. So if you were on the fence about hopping on board before, this has now effectively become a no-brainer decision. In other words, what used to cost hundreds of dollars per month to handle certain workloads, can now be obtained for the price of one Starbucks latte. Now we’re getting somewhere!

Self-host your ultimate resource-efficient AI contraption

We’ve mentioned that, on top of everything else it offers, it comes with an open-source license, so there is no need to depend on other platforms hosting it for you if you’re ready and willing to go through the potential technical hurdle of self-hosting it. But those who don’t shy away from challenges of this nature can effectively kiss goodbye to usage limits, privacy concerns, and cloud dependency hell. Know that, as of right now, OpenAI has shown no signs of being willing to let us take a peek inside its code. And that is the philosophy and mission of Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek’s creator – to make AI accessible to all rather than trying to extract every penny out of its users.

DeepSeek is revolutionizing academic research

Using AI for studying and research is nothing new in and of itself. But with DeepSeek, it just got better! With ChatGPT and previous generations of AI research sidekicks, it used to be that you’d ask a question and they delivered an answer. Sounds straightforward, but the problem of AI straight-up making things up on the fly, collectively referred to as ‘hallucination’, still persisted. Which meant that, although you technically got an answer, you were never able to outright trust it 100%, since you never knew if it was completely accurate or not.

DeepStack, however, not only provides an answer, but also gives you a glimpse into its thought process, allowing you to spot any potential inconsistencies and errors in its reasoning in real-time. Not only that; it also tells you if there’s a point in its thought process where it encountered a roadblock and how it went about overcoming it. You can critically evaluate these approaches on your own or even nudge it to come up with new ones if that would perhaps alter its suggestion or answer. Remember that it won’t cost you anything if you decide to self-host it, so you can have as much fun with this as you’d like.

An employee that works for you 24/7 without payroll or benefits

If you want to hire the best people, well, it won’t exactly be free. Plus, you need to factor in the fact that humans simply weren’t made to be plugged into a computer 24/7 – after a while, hunger and fatigue will set in. There is also the aspect of motivation – handling grunt work is not something you want your top talent to be spending their time on, as those tend to be the people with very specific interests and a multitude of options. But now, DeepSeek is here to shatter the equation, and bear in mind that ChatGPT came dangerously close to doing that on its own. Imagine having an assistant that never gets burned out, never asks for a raise, and never complains.

Finally, a way to reduce healthcare queues?

Remember the APIs we mentioned and all the additional functionality you can get out of AI by hooking it up with third-party services? Now, in 2025, we legitimately have a way of constructing the kind of AI that will not only provide relevant information and deduct things in real-time, but also do so in a human-like manner. In other words, it won’t be just like another chatbot that provides vague and generic answers that hardly get you anywhere.

Imagine hooking all of those research and diagnostic capabilities with a module for natural speech synthesis and voila, an AI-powered medical office assistant is born that can reliably answer patient queries. Not only that, it can also schedule doctor’s appointments, check up on patients, find ways to reduce waiting times, etc. In another world where privacy is not at the forefront of every legislation, it could even connect to a patient's wearable to check their vital signs and so on, the kind of things that would be considered ‘grunt work’ in the healthcare system. By connecting all of these things together into a single interconnected unit, crazy things are looming on the horizon!

DeepSeek as your premium consultant with a specialized area of expertise

An AI companion that gives you answers is impressive on its own, but you know what’s even better? Having access to a specialized consultant with technical, niche-specific knowledge that’s available all the time and doesn’t charge a dime. In the past, you had to shell out astronomical amounts of money to hire consultants of such high calibre. Again, the emphasis is on highly specific answers to highly specific questions with a ton of nuances and variables. The kind you simply cannot get an answer to by reading generic articles and advice online. With that being said, highly specialized consultants will likely still remain valuable to business owners with deep pockets. It’s just that the average Joe can now get a similar kind of answer without necessarily breaking the bank.

But how reliable is DeepSeek’s output really?

Unfortunately, hallucination still remains a major issue irrespective of the AI model you like using. And, as it turns out, DeepSeek is not completely off the hook either. While it’s certainly better at giving you a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes process, it’s still you – the user – who needs to do the heavy-lifting of fact-checking and verifying that the advice it gives you is indeed correct. According to NewsGuard, up to one third of its answers tend to contain false information, and about every second response will give you generic, non-actionable types of answers that aren’t really of much help. So, just like all the rest of the AI models out there, DeepSeek still has a long way to go in terms of being 100% reliable and hands-off.

Conclusion – are we on the brink of another AI revolution?

AI is evolving all the time, and DeepSeek is the latest and greatest in this regard. However, this doesn’t mean it’s automatically superior in each and every regard just because it’s a new kid on the block. Yes, it’s more cost efficient, but it’s also designed to excel in different areas compared to ChatGPT. If, however, you are just looking for an ever-encompassing toolbox to tackle various problems that brings additional things to the table, DeepSeek is certainly worth looking into, especially if you’re comfortable with tech and setting things up on your own.

Whether you’re trying to make sense of advanced analytics or solve a complex company structuring problem, DeepSeek is likely to be more useful than ChatGPT and other conventional AI solutions. Remember, it’s open-source, so if you decide to integrate it and happen to like it, you’re going to have loads of fun with it. For free.

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