DeepSeek R1 (0528)
DeepSeek·May 2025reasoningopen weights · MIT
67.8
modhub Index
DeepSeek R1 triggered the January 2025 "DeepSeek moment": an openly licensed reasoning model approaching o1-class performance, trained with pure reinforcement learning, at a fraction of Western lab costs. The 0528 update lifted its math and coding scores further. Newer DeepSeek releases have absorbed its techniques, but R1 remains one of the most-downloaded open models ever and the foundation of countless distilled variants.
Benchmark results
Where it shines
- Historic open-weights reasoning breakthrough
- Visible chain-of-thought useful for research and distillation
- Huge ecosystem of fine-tunes and distillations
Alternatives to DeepSeek R1 (0528)
A trillion-parameter open reasoning agent that can chain 200–300 tool calls — the open-weights agentic standout of late 2025.
OpenAI's dedicated 2025 reasoning model that pioneered thinking-with-images and agentic tool use within chain-of-thought.
The model that made 30-hour autonomous coding sessions real — 77.2% SWE-bench Verified and a 1M-token context beta at $3/$15.
OpenAI's August 2025 unified flagship that merged the GPT and o-series reasoning lines into one model with selectable effort.
Frequently asked questions
- How much does the DeepSeek R1 (0528) API cost?
- DeepSeek R1 (0528) costs $0.55 per million input tokens and $2.19 per million output tokens, with cached input at $0.14 per million. A workload of 10M input and 1.5M output tokens per month costs about $8.79.
- What is the context window of DeepSeek R1 (0528)?
- DeepSeek R1 (0528) supports a context window of 128,000 tokens (128K), with up to 64K output tokens per response.
- Is DeepSeek R1 (0528) open source?
- Yes — DeepSeek R1 (0528) is an open-weights model released under the MIT license, so it can be downloaded and self-hosted.
- What are the best alternatives to DeepSeek R1 (0528)?
- The closest alternatives by overall capability are Kimi K2 Thinking, OpenAI o3, Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5. See the comparison pages for detailed head-to-head breakdowns.