deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1
deepseek-ai
DeepSeek-R1 is an open-source DeepSeek text-generation model with an official GitHub repository and availability through DeepSeek website and API access.
Scorecard
- Cost effectiveness83
- Adoption signal79
- Developer experience78
- Technical capability78
- Speed & availability76
- Risk & evidence74
- Reasoning & knowledge72
- Pricing clarity65
- Coding & agentic62
- Multimodal & I/O55
Kainotomic evaluation
DeepSeek-R1 remains a capable text reasoning model, but its public evidence places it below newer frontier anchors such as Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 on broad capability, coding, and reasoning. Its 671B MoE architecture (37B active) and reported SWE-bench Verified result of 49.2% support solid technical and software capability. The current Arena-Hard-v2 preview result—58.0%, ninth place—supports a good but no longer leading reasoning score. It is text-focused, so it trails multimodal models such as Gemini 3.5 Flash. Value is the strongest practical dimension. Artificial Analysis reports median provider pricing of $1.675/M input and $4.70/M output tokens, materially better than premium proprietary frontier models, while tracked providers can deliver 178.8 output tokens/s and 14.24s TTFT. MIT licensing, weights, local-running material, API access, and broad third-party serving improve flexibility and developer access. These advantages place it above DeepSeek-V3.2’s published developer-experience anchor, though deployment of the full model is operationally demanding. Coding evidence is mixed: the official 49.2% SWE-bench Verified claim is meaningful, but Terminus 1 using R1 recorded only 5.7% ±1.4 on Terminal-Bench 1.0, and no DeepSWE result is listed. LiveCodeBench was checked but the supplied evidence contains no score. Vendor-reported historical ArenaHard 92.3 is not directly comparable with the current style-controlled Arena-Hard result. Official pricing detail is incomplete, so cost and pricing scores rely partly on Artificial Analysis provider observations.
Strengths
- MIT-licensed open weights with official local-running guidance and API access.
- Competitive observed provider pricing and strong tracked third-party throughput.
- Documented SWE-bench Verified result and substantial public recognition.
Caveats
- Text-centric offering with no supplied evidence of native image, audio, or video I/O.
- Current Arena-Hard-v2 result is good but below current leading models.
- Full-weight self-hosting has substantial infrastructure requirements.