The Chinese model that sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley. DeepSeek R1 matches GPT-4 class models on reasoning benchmarks while costing pennies to run via API. Completely free on their website with no account required - just open and start chatting. The R1 model's chain-of-thought reasoning is genuinely impressive, you can watch it think through problems step by step. Open-source, which means you can run it locally if you have the hardware. The elephant in the room - your conversations go through Chinese servers, so don't paste your startup's secret sauce in there. For general research, learning, and coding questions where privacy isn't critical, it's an absurdly good free option. V3 is their latest for general chat and it's fast.