r1 from DeepSeek is here, the first serious challenge to OpenAI's o1.

r1 is an open model, and it comes in dramatically cheaper than o1.

People are very excited. Normally cost is not a big deal, but o1 and its inference-time compute strategy is the exception. Here, cheaper really can mean better, even if the answers aren’t quite as good.

You can get DeepSeek-r1 on HuggingFace here, and they link to the paper.

The question is how to think about r1 as it compares to o1, and also to o1 Pro and to the future o3-mini that we’ll get in a few weeks, and then to o3 which we’ll likely get in a month or two.

Taking into account everything I’ve seen, r1 is still a notch below o1 in terms of quality of output, and further behind o1 Pro and the future o3-mini [...]