# DeepSeek models

75 Hacker News commenters recommended DeepSeek models and 17 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** People recommend DeepSeek's open-weight models for strong performance at low cost and self-hosting. Critics mainly point to refusals on political questions.

## Why people recommend it

- Self-host or run locally (7 comments): "they fully openly provide every model so if you want that infinite stability you can easily host it yourself for eternity" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49631942)) "publish it to the public, some of not majority contribute with open-weight models making a future of local llm possible" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46782040)) "The weights are open and you can use the model with any third party provider that gives you the DPA you want." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47894377))
- Low cost compared to alternatives (5 comments): "You'd be surprised how much money running something like DeepSeek will save you over the cloud systems." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46114227)) "Deepseek/Qwen/GLM all have decent models that will work fine for some use cases at much lower costs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890691)) "Chinese models are better price performance and actually open which is in many cases better" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49813324))
- Efficiency and technical innovations (4 comments): "Deepseek was the company that invented some and improved some other ideas and got them to workreliably in production" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49911777)) "Newer models, especially from DeepSeek, do a nice job of reducing KV cache memory impact" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49727749)) "Deepseek introduced few good optimizations that every new model seems to use now too" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46459817))
- Competitive with frontier models (3 comments): "genuinely improving the SOTA in inference and training, especially given their compute-constrained situation" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48577133)) "DeepSeek offers an open model at Sonnet+ level while being cheaper than Haiku" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48312310)) "The latest DeepSeek and Kimi open weight models are competitive with GPT-5." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46108013))

## What people warn about

- Refuses some political questions (2 comments): "recent deepseek models refuse on some political questions (not just API level refusals)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50256060)) "they refuse to answer questions related to Tiananmen" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46127968))
- Possible intellectual property misuse (2 comments): "it seems like it's artificially cheap and somewhat static because they took others' intellectual property" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48345761)) "DeepSeek serves Claude instead of its own models and collects exchanges for model training" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49648821))
- Slow to start responding (2 comments): "the Deepseek models while fast overall can have a horrendous wait before they start responding" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49410375)) "I'm super frustrated with how slow DeepSeek is though." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48486824))
- Behind frontier models on quality (4 comments): "having to have a frontier model review/fix/redo everything multiple times per task, I gave up" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50135196)) "the deepseek models also don't perform to the same level" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49290845)) "DS models seem to get stuck in loops or tell me nonsense" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49729673))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Qwen 3.8 27B](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen-3-8-27b.md): 1173 recommend
- [Z.ai GLM](https://hackerapproved.com/p/glm-5-2.md): 1043 recommend
- [Kimi](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kimi-k3.md): 931 recommend
- [Gemma 4](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gemma-4.md): 713 recommend
- [Qwen](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen.md): 474 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "DeepSeek models", https://hackerapproved.com/p/deepseek-models/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).