DeepSeek V3 vs DeepSeek R1

671B-parameter MoE model with 37B active per token. Trained for roughly $5.6M of compute — a landmark in cost-efficient frontier training. Frontier-class quality at a fraction of the cost of the closed proprietary frontier. The DeepSeek licence permits commercial use with limited restrictions on military and unlawful applications. Running V3 yourself requires serious hardware (8× H100 at fp8); most teams will use it via the DeepSeek API or providers like Together.

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.