Sheldon Cooper/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images If you ever wondered what it would look like to see someone’s stream of consciousness in real time, DeepSeek R1 might be the closest you’ll get.
When DeepSeek R1 landed on the internet in late January , it caught the AI industry off guard. Suddenly, there was a freely available and open-source "reasoning" AI model that could rival the equivalent $200 per month offering from OpenAI , creator of ChatGPT. Almost immediately, tech stocks plummeted . Investors wondered why they were throwing billions of dollars at OpenAI, Google and Microsoft when a scrappy team out of China was seemingly able to do just as much with significantly fewer resources. Nvidia, the company making the chips powering AI development, saw the single largest market value drop in US history, losing more than $600 billion in a day .
Reasoning AI models can handle more-complex questions and do so by breaking problems down step-by-step, whereas the free version of ChatGPT tries to predict the next best word in a sentence.
Essentially, DeepSeek R1 commodified reasoning-level AI models overnight — imagine Toyota suddenly producing Ferrari-level engines en masse.
I spoke with AI experts , and the most interesting or amusing characteristic of DeepSeek R1 is being able to see its chain of thought. If you ask DeepSeek to tell you a bedtime story about a tenacious kitten, say, you’re able to see all the considerations it’s making while it’s processing your request. Basically, you can see DeepSeek think. And it’s fascinating.
DeepSeek will literally sometimes say, "hmm," which is both quirky and bewildering. OpenAI doesn’t let users see ChatGPT’s train of thought, so that it doesn’t give away its secrets (though now it’s showing small snippets). DeepSeek R1 is also open source, meaning any company can use its AI model, which is a major threat to OpenAI. An example of DeepSeek R1’s train of thought. How I’ve been testing DeepSeek
I’ve been using DeepSeek on desktop for the past week. For security reasons, I opted not to install the app on my phone. Experts advise against installing the app on […]
DeepSeek R1 First Impressions: I’ve Seen How the Machine Thinks
