Chinese AI Lab DeepSeek Challenges OpenAI With Its Reasoning Model

A Chinese AI lab, DeepSeek, has released a reasoning model called “DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview” that rivals the state-of-the-art OpenAI o1 models. In the open-source space, it’s for the first time we are seeing that an AI model has replicated OpenAI’s new paradigm with the o1 reasoning models.

Just like OpenAI’s o1 “thinking” mechanism, the DeepSeek model has a “Deep Think” option that allows it to re-evaluate its response before giving a final answer. The best part is that DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview shows the raw chain of thought, which is missing in OpenAI’s o1 models.

Not to mention, DeepSeek is going to open-source its reasoning model and release a paper detailing how they have implemented the reasoning engine. It might open the floodgates on test-time compute aka inference scaling in the open-source space.

Apart from that, DeepSeek has also released benchmarks that show its DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview model does better than OpenAI’s o1-preview model. In benchmarks such as AIME 2024, MATH, and Codeforces, the DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview model outperforms the o1-preview model. In other tests, it comes very close to beating OpenAI’s flagship model.

In case you are unaware, DeepSeek is backed by High-Flyer, a China-based Quant fund that has turned into an AI pioneer, according to the Financial Times. I tested the new DeepSeek model and it really surprised me. It’s very fast at reasoning and solves many problems including the Strawberry question, complex puzzles, and more.

The DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview model has become one of the promising alternatives to ChatGPT. It’s freely available and users can check out the model at chat.deepseek.com. Users get 50 free messages per day, but since it’s a Chinese model, it’s censored on some contentious topics.