How to Use DeepSeek in 2026: Complete Beginner Guide

Swipe to read →

DeepSeek went from unknown Chinese research lab to global household na

This guide walks through setup, the DeepThink reasoning mode, web search and file uploads, coding workflows, API pricing (including the off-peak trick that halves your bill), running it locally, and t

What Is DeepSeek in 2026?

DeepSeek is an AI lab based in Hangzhou, China, spun out of the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer. It builds frontier-class language models and gives most of that power away: the consumer app and web

Getting Started: Free in Two Minutes

DeepSeek deliberately has almost no onboarding friction:

DeepThink: The Mode That Made DeepSeek Famous

DeepThink is DeepSeek's reasoning mode — the descendant of R1, the feature that started the whole frenzy. Turn it on and the model visibly works through the problem before answering: exploring approac

Search, Files, and Images

Three features turn DeepSeek from a chat toy into a work tool:

DeepSeek for Coding

Coding is where V4 earns its reputation. DeepSeek-V4-Pro posts a Terminal Bench 2.1 score of 87.9 and heavy gains on repository-level and agentic coding benchmarks — real-world "work inside an existin

The API: Frontier Power at Commodity Prices

Even if you never write code, the API pricing explains DeepSeek's strategy. Per million tokens (peak rates):

Running DeepSeek Locally

DeepSeek built its reputation on open weights — R1 shipped under an MIT license, and the earlier open releases (R1 distills, the V3 family) remain freely downloadable on Hugging Face. That means a ver

Read the Full Article

Learn how to use DeepSeek in 2026: free app setup, DeepThink mode, V4 models, coding workflows, API pricing, and the hon