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Cutting-edge Chinese “reasoning” model rivals OpenAI o1—and it’s free to download
DeepSeek R1 is free to run locally and modify, and it matches OpenAI’s o1 in several benchmarks.
On Monday, Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released its new R1 model family under an open MIT license, with its largest version containing 671 billion parameters. The releases immediately caught the attention of the AI community because most existing open-weights models—which can often be run and fine-tuned on local hardware—have lagged behind proprietary models like OpenAI's o1 in so-called reasoning benchmarks. Even with the potential censorship, Dean Ball, an AI researcher at George Mason University, wrote on X, "The impressive performance of DeepSeek's distilled models (smaller versions of r1) means that very capable reasoners will continue to proliferate widely and be runnable on local hardware, far from the eyes of any top-down control regime."
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