Open-source artificial intelligence (AI) has reached another milestone — and the cost differences it represents could shake up the industry.
On par with o1
On Monday, Chinese AI lab DeepSeek announced the release of R1, the full version of its newest open-source reasoning model, which the company launched in preview in November. The company noted that R1 beats or is on par with OpenAI’s o1 in several math, coding, and reasoning benchmarks.
Also: $450 and 19 hours is all it takes to rival OpenAI’s o1-preview
Similar to o1, R1’s reasoning takes more time to answer than other models, but its queries are meant to be more sophisticated and accurate. Alongside the 671-billion-parameter model, DeepSeek also released six smaller “distilled” versions with as few as 1.5 billion parameters, which can be run on a local device.
“Pushing the boundaries of **open AI**!” DeepSeek teased in the thread.
DeepSeek’s release marks a promising trend in open-source reasoning models. Just over a week ago, UC Berkeley researchers succeeded in creating an open-source model on par with o1-preview. It only took them 19 hours and about $450 in compute costs.
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Pricing
R1’s pricing structure is similarly poised to give OpenAI a run for its money. API access starts at just $0.14 for a million tokens (about 750,000 words analyzed) — a fraction of the $7.50 OpenAI charges for the equivalent tier. OpenAI is currently offering unlimited access to o1 for $2,400 a year through ChatGPT Pro.
That multiple labs are increasingly able to build models with capabilities comparable to OpenAI’s proves competitive AI doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive. Both DeepSeek and UC Berkeley making strides in the open-source AI — and releasing their training methods — draws attention to OpenAI’s long-forgotten original mission (though the company’s ironic name persists).
Limitations
R1 does have some limitations, however. Models made by Chinese companies are subject to certain censors by the Chinese government, meaning while their abilities are comparable, there are certain queries R1 may simply not answer compared to o1. When tested by ZDNET’s Tiernan Ray, R1-preview struggled to clearly provide its chain of thought when compared with o1-preview, striking Ray as “baffling and tedious in ways o1 is not.”
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At the moment, OpenAI is preparing to release its next-gen model, o3. Users can access R1 via an MIT license, chat with the model at chat.deepseek.com, and check out the API.
Artificial Intelligence
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