I am convinced that was mostly just marketing. No one uses deepseek as far as I can tell. People are not running it locally. People choose GPT/Gemini/Claude/Grok if you are giving your data away anyway.

My biggest source of my conspiracy is that I made a reddit thread asking a question: "Why all the deepseek hype" or something like that. And to this day, I get odd, 'pro deepseek' comments from accounts only used every few months. Its not like this was some highly upvoted topic that is in the 'Top'.

I'd put that deepseek marketing on-par with an Apple marketing campaign.

I don't use DeepSeek, but I prefer Kimi and GLM to closed models for most of my work.

Except that, In OpenRouter, Deepseek always maintain in Top 10 Ranking. Although I did not use it personally, i believe that their main advantage over other model is price/performance.