DeepSeek R1 Shakes the AI Model Market

DeepSeek released R1 in January 2025 and drew global attention by pairing strong reasoning performance with openly available model weights and detailed technical discussion.

R1 used reinforcement-learning techniques to improve behavior on tasks where answers could be evaluated, particularly mathematics and coding. The full model had a mixture-of-experts architecture with hundreds of billions of total parameters but activated only a subset for each token. DeepSeek also released distilled versions based on smaller model families.

The release challenged assumptions about how expensive frontier reasoning had to be and intensified interest in efficient inference, quantization, and open-weight deployment. It also showed how quickly competition in advanced AI had become global rather than concentrated in a few US laboratories.