I've been initially fascinated by Claude, but then I found myself drawn to Deepseek. My use case is different though, I want someone to talk to.

I also use DeepSeek R1 as a daily driver. Combined with Qwen3 when I need better tool usage.

Now that both Google and Claude are out, I expect to see DeepSeek R2 released very soon. It would be funny to watch an actual open source model getting close to the commercial competition.

A nice thing about Deepseek is that it is so cheap to run. It's nice being able to explore conversational trees without getting a $12 bill at the end of it.