DeepSeek R1 vs QwQ 32B Preview

Reasoning model trained with reinforcement learning on top of DeepSeek V3-Base. MIT licence — even the weights are unrestricted, making R1 the most permissively-licensed frontier reasoning model. Generates long internal chains-of-thought before answering, trading latency for accuracy on math, code, and reasoning benchmarks. Distilled variants (e.g. R1 Distill Llama 70B) recover most of the quality at much smaller scales.

Qwen's reasoning-focused 'thinking' model. Generates long chains-of-thought before answering, similar to OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek R1 lineage. Optimised for math and competition-style problem solving. The Preview tag means Qwen is iterating quickly; later versions may obsolete this one. Useful today for math-heavy workloads where a slow, careful answer is preferred to a fast wrong one.