DeepSeek, a Chinese AI research lab backed by High-Flyer Capital Management, has unveiled its latest reasoning models, DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-R1-Zero. The models are positioned as alternatives to proprietary systems like OpenAI-o1.
DeepSeek-R1, the flagship model, is fully open-source and distributed under the MIT license, allowing developers to use, modify, and commercialise it freely. Developers can access DeepSeek-R1 and its API at chat.deepseek.com. The API offers functionalities for fine-tuning and distillation.
“We are living in a timeline where a non-US company is keeping the original mission of OpenAI alive – truly open, frontier research that empowers all,” said Jim Fan, Senior Research Manager and Lead of Embodied AI (GEAR Lab) at NVIDIA.
Alongside the technical report, the lab also released six distilled models, ranging from 1.5 billion to 70 billion parameters. These models are optimised for efficiency, and claim performance levels similar to OpenAI-o1-mini. The models are designed to address tasks in math, code generation, and reasoning with competitive accuracy.
Leveraging large-scale reinforcement learning in post-training, DeepSeek-R1 achieves high performance with minimal reliance on labelled data. “Our goal is to explore the potential of LLMs to develop reasoning capabilities without any supervised data, focusing on their self-evolution through a pure RL process,” said the team behind DeepSeek.
DeepSeek-R1-Zero is built on a pure reinforcement learning (RL) framework, which allows it to develop reasoning capabilities autonomously. Initial evaluations show that it achieved a pass rate of 71% on the AIME 2024 benchmark, an increase from 15.6%. However, the model faced challenges such as poor readability and language mixing.
To address these issues, DeepSeek introduced DeepSeek-R1, which incorporated a multi-stage training approach and cold-start data. This method improved model’s performance by refining its reasoning abilities while maintaining clarity in output. “The model has shown performance comparable to OpenAI’s o1-1217 on various reasoning tasks,” the company said.
DeepSeek-R1 achieved a score of 79.8% Pass@1 on AIME 2024, slightly surpassing OpenAI-o1-1217.
“I love DeepSeek so much! o1 level model is now open-source (MIT license),” said Paras Chopra, founder of Wingify.
“Deepseek R1 is on par with o1 and is open-source!! It blows my mind that Chinese make great, open and transparent tech,” said Bindu Reddy, founder of Abacus AI.
The launch of DeepSeek comes after it recently launched DeepSeek-V3, which was touted as the best open-source model.
“Whale 🐋 folks, respect,” said KissanAI founder Pratik Desai.
OpenAI is currently facing controversy over its o3 model due to its undisclosed funding of EpochAI’s FrontierMath benchmark and prior access to a significant portion of the test data. Despite these concerns, the company plans to release its new o3 mini model within the next couple of weeks.
