DeepSeek Unveils Massive R1 Model Family, Challenging OpenAI’s Dominance

The new DeepSeek R1 model family launched earlier this week, and it is the Chinese AI firm’s largest version to date. This new version contains over 671 billion parameters, giving it the operational power to compete with rivals like the OpenAI o1 simulated reasoning (SR) model.

DeepSeek R1 Model Takes The AI Industry By Storm

Over the past few years, various regions have increased their efforts in the AI industry. While OpenAI currently leads the industry, a handful of rising competitors are also trying to take a share of the market.

Chinese AI firm DeepSeek is one of such rising competition and with its new R1 model family, the firm hopes to rival OpenAI. This new AI line-up is DeepSeek’s first-generation reasoning model and consists of the DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1 models.

These models come with an MIT Licence for commercial use within and outside the AI industry. To make these new reasoning AI models available for public usage, DeepSeek “have open-sourced DeepSeek-R1-Zero, DeepSeek-R1, and six dense models distilled from DeepSeek-R1 based on Llama and Qwen.”

Under testing across various benchmarks, one of the six dense models of the DeepSeek R1 model, the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B, outperforms OpenAI’s o1-mini reasoning model. This is a great achievement for DeepSeek and also a sign that the AI industry is evolving and becoming more competitive.

Abilities Of The New DeepSeek R1 AI Line-Up

One of the unique abilities of the Hangzhou-based firm’s AI lineup is the ability to use a chain of thought (CoT) when solving problems. This is possible as a result of the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to the R1 AI base model.

As a result of this, the “DeepSeek-R1-Zero demonstrates capabilities such as self-verification, reflection, and generating long CoTs.” The firm also points out that their R1 model “is the first open research to validate that reasoning capabilities of LLMs can be incentivized purely through RL, without the need for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a preliminary step.”

This is a landmark for not only DeepSeek as an AI firm but also the community of researchers in the AI field. As enterprises get to make use of this new AI model from DeepSeek we’ll get to discover more of its abilities and functions.