Question 1

What is DeepSeek R1?

Accepted Answer

DeepSeek R1 is a large language model from DeepSeek, released on 20 January 2025. Open-weights reasoning model that matches o1 at 1/25 the price.

Question 2

When was DeepSeek R1 released?

Accepted Answer

DeepSeek R1 was released by DeepSeek on 20 January 2025.

Question 3

How much does DeepSeek R1 cost?

Accepted Answer

DeepSeek R1 costs $0.55 per 1 million input tokens and $2.19 per 1 million output tokens via DeepSeek’s API. At a typical 3:1 input/output ratio the blended cost works out to about $0.96 per 1M tokens.

Question 4

How smart is DeepSeek R1?

Accepted Answer

DeepSeek R1 scores 73 out of 100 on our intelligence index — a strong production-tier composite of MMLU, MMLU Pro, GPQA, MATH and HumanEval benchmark scores. That places it #7 of 22 language models we track.

Question 5

What is the context window of DeepSeek R1?

Accepted Answer

DeepSeek R1 has a 128k-token context window — roughly 96,000 words of text. That’s what you can fit into a single request (your prompt plus all uploaded documents and the model’s response combined).

Question 6

What is DeepSeek R1 best for?

Accepted Answer

DeepSeek R1 is most useful for self-hosted reasoning, math & code and cost-sensitive agents. Its key strengths are reasoning at gpt-class scores, open weights and cheap.

Question 7

How fast is DeepSeek R1?

Accepted Answer

DeepSeek R1 generates around 60 output tokens per second with a typical time-to-first-token of 1.5 seconds on the major API providers. Reasoning models that "think" before answering will appear slower on tokens-per-second since they spend time on internal chain-of-thought.

Question 8

Is DeepSeek R1 better than DeepSeek V3?

Accepted Answer

DeepSeek R1 scores higher on our intelligence index (73 vs 67). On most general tasks DeepSeek R1 has the edge — but DeepSeek V3 can still be the better pick on cost or specific capabilities. See our full DeepSeek R1 vs DeepSeek V3 comparison at /ai-models/compare/deepseek-r1-vs-deepseek-v3/.

Question 9

What is the best alternative to DeepSeek R1?

Accepted Answer

The closest alternatives to DeepSeek R1 are DeepSeek V3, GPT-5.5 and Claude 4 Opus. Each shares most of DeepSeek R1’s use-cases — pick by price, context window or specific capability rather than headline intelligence.

Question 10

Is DeepSeek R1 open source?

Accepted Answer

Yes. DeepSeek R1 is open-source — the weights are publicly available, and you can self-host it or use a hosted provider (Together, Fireworks, Groq, Replicate). Some open-source licenses include usage caveats; check the model’s license file before deploying.

Question 11

Can I use DeepSeek R1 for free?

Accepted Answer

Yes. DeepSeek R1 is open-source — you can download the weights and self-host for free. DeepSeek’s hosted chat at chat.deepseek.com also offers free access with rate limits; the API itself is paid but very cheap relative to comparable models.

DeepSeek R1

At a glance

Benchmark scores

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