DeepSeek-R1 is a powerful AI language model created by the Chinese company DeepSeek, optimized for tasks requiring logical reasoning, coding, and mathematics. It uses a hybrid training approach that incorporates reinforcement learning from scratch, enabling strong step-by-step (chain-of-thought) reasoning. Built on a 671B parameter Mixture-of-Experts framework (with only 37B active during inference), it delivers high performance efficiently. DeepSeek-R1 rivals top proprietary models like OpenAI’s o1 in reasoning and coding benchmarks, while remaining open-source and more cost-effective to deploy. It’s available via DeepSeek’s own platform, Amazon Bedrock, and for local deployment.