Lesson 94 of 1455
DeepSeek R1 reasoning open-weights
R1 was the open-weights reasoning shock of early 2025. A year later it is still the default for anyone who needs o-series reasoning without paying o-series prices.
Builders · Model Families · ~17 min read
Why R1 matters
DeepSeek R1 showed that an open-weights team could ship o1-class reasoning on a shoestring. The weights are downloadable, the quality is genuine, and the pricing on DeepSeek's own API is roughly 1/20th of OpenAI o-series.
- Thinks in visible chain-of-thought before answering
- Strong on math, code, and logic benchmarks
- Downloadable weights for self-hosted reasoning
- Distilled smaller versions (R1-Distill) run on consumer GPUs
Compare the options
| Option | DeepSeek R1 | OpenAI high-effort reasoning | GPT-5.5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost per M output | Very low | High | High |
| Latency | Slow (thinks) | Slow to moderate | Moderate |
| Open weights | Yes | No | No |
| Quality | Near-frontier on selected reasoning tasks | Frontier | Frontier |
The API returns thinking and final answer separately.
resp = client.chat.completions.create( model="deepseek-reasoner", messages=[{"role": "user", "content": hard_problem}], ) # response includes reasoning_content + contentWhen to still pay for high-effort GPT
Frontier competition math, novel scientific reasoning, and any benchmark where the last 3 points of accuracy matter. For everyday hard problems, R1 is enough.
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