The future of AI shouldn't belong to a handful of model providers. We chose DeepSeek because we believe there is a better way.
At Rival, we have a simple philosophy: the model should serve the work, not define the platform.
While frontier models are powerful, they are also extremely costly at scale. And AI advancing too quickly to build an entire enterprise strategy around one model. As open-source models reach the capabilities of frontier models, the economics of running those models matter just as much as what they can do.
Rival is built for choice, not dependency. That's why we've chosen DeepSeek as a core Rival-hosted model.
Powerful AI Shouldn't Require Closed AI
For years, the assumption has been that the most capable AI would come from the largest proprietary platforms. DeepSeek has helped challenge that assumption.
Its models have demonstrated that open models can deliver increasingly sophisticated reasoning, coding, tool use, and general AI performance while operating with dramatically different economics.
DeepSeek's latest V4 generation includes Flash and Pro models, supports reasoning and non-reasoning modes, tool calling, and context windows of up to one million tokens, allowing it to work with large amounts of information in a single interaction.
That makes DeepSeek more than an inexpensive alternative. It makes open AI a serious foundation for real work.
Efficiency Matters
The AI industry has largely taught users to accept an uncomfortable equation: More intelligence = more compute = more cost.
We don't think that equation should define the future of AI.
DeepSeek has consistently focused on improving model and inference efficiency. Previous generations introduced innovations such as sparse attention designed to reduce the computational burden of processing long contexts while maintaining model quality.
That philosophy closely matches ours.
Rival is built around the idea that enterprise AI should become dramatically more efficient as it scales, not dramatically more expensive.
Better AI economics means AI can be used more often, for more work, by more people.
Open Matters
DeepSeek's history of releasing model weights and research gives developers and infrastructure providers more freedom than closed-model ecosystems traditionally allow. That's important to Rival because we don't believe customers should have to surrender control of their AI strategy to access powerful intelligence.
We want organizations to be able to choose how AI runs, where it runs, and which models make sense for different workloads. DeepSeek gives us another powerful building block for making that possible.
We Host It. You Use It.
We also wanted to remove the complexity normally associated with using open models. Rival hosts DeepSeek for you.
No separate DeepSeek account.
No API key to configure.
No model infrastructure to manage.
Open Rival and start working.
Free users get access to DeepSeek Flash, giving everyone a fast, efficient model for everyday work.
Pro and Team users get DeepSeek Flash and DeepSeek Pro, providing additional power for more demanding reasoning and workloads.
And with the Rival LLM API, DeepSeek doesn't have to stay inside Rival. Developers can bring Rival-hosted models into their own applications, products, and systems without taking on the burden of hosting the underlying models themselves.
But We're Still Model Agnostic
Choosing DeepSeek doesn't mean choosing only DeepSeek. Quite the opposite. Rival is model agnostic by design. Customers can use different models based on the work they're doing, their performance requirements, their security needs, and their economics. Because we don't believe the future belongs to one model.
The best AI is the AI you can actually use
DeepSeek simply represents something we believe strongly in: highly capable AI can be more open, more efficient, and more accessible.
The AI race has spent years obsessing over benchmark scores. We care about something different.
Can you put the model to work?
Can you afford to run it at scale?
Can you integrate it into real workflows?
Can you use it without locking your company into one provider?
Can developers build on top of it?
Can an entire organization benefit from it?
For us, that's where DeepSeek stands out. It combines powerful AI with an approach to openness and efficiency that aligns with where we believe the industry needs to go.
That's why we chose it. And why we're making it available directly inside Rival.
Powerful AI shouldn't be scarce. It should be infrastructure.
And DeepSeek is just the beginning. We’ll be adding more Rival-hosted LLMs soon, giving users even more choice without the complexity of managing models, infrastructure, or separate providers. Stay tuned.