DeepSeek‑R1: Open‑Source Reasoning AI Software Revolutionizing the Field

Published on August 18, 2025

What Is DeepSeek‑R1?

DeepSeek‑R1 is a highly advanced, open-source large language model developed by China's DeepSeek AI. Released under an MIT license in early 2025, it delivers reasoning capabilities on par with leading models like OpenAI’s o1, but at just a fraction of the cost.:contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}

Architecture & Training Approach

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE): DeepSeek‑R1 uses a 671-billion-parameter model where only ~37 billion parameters are activated per inference, enabling efficiency without sacrificing performance.:contentReference[oaicite:2]{index=2}
Hybrid Training Strategy: Started with a reinforcement learning-only model (R1‑Zero), then refined through supervised fine-tuning and another RL phase to enhance fluency and readability.:contentReference[oaicite:3]{index=3}

Performance Highlights

Mathematics: 79.8% on AIME 2024 and up to 97.3% on MATH‑500 — outperforming or matching o1.:contentReference[oaicite:4]{index=4}
Coding: Achieved a Codeforces Elo score of ~2,029, surpassing 96% of human programmers.:contentReference[oaicite:5]{index=5}
General knowledge & Benchmarks: MMLU: ~90.8%; Other reasoning and QA tasks (GPQA, AlpacaEval) also show strong performance.:contentReference[oaicite:6]{index=6}

Open-Source and Accessible

MIT License: Fully open — anyone can modify, distill, or use the model, including commercial purposes.:contentReference[oaicite:7]{index=7}
Distilled Variants: Smaller versions ranging from 1.5B to 70B parameters (based on LLaMA and Qwen) enable local deployment.:contentReference[oaicite:8]{index=8}
Run Locally: Community users have shared guides for running R1 on personal machines using tools like llama.cpp, Unsloth, or Ollama.:contentReference[oaicite:9]{index=9}

Developer Integration & Pricing

DeepSeek‑R1 can be accessed via API with competitive token pricing — often several times cheaper than proprietary models. It supports chain-of-thought reasoning and standard API schema like:

{
  "model": "deepseek-reasoner"
}

Pricing (Cloud/API): ~$0.55 per million input tokens and ~$2.19 per million output tokens—dramatically lower than comparable services.:contentReference[oaicite:10]{index=10}

Why It Matters

DeepSeek‑R1 shows that high-performance AI can be accessible, transparent, and cost-effective. Its open-source nature, efficient MoE architecture, and low-cost deployment possibilities make it a serious contender in the reasoning AI domain.