What makes it a massive game changer is the fact that it's completely open source and open weights. WIth this, everyone suddenly has access to a top tier model that rivals the currently best model in the world. I.e. everybody wins, and this model is likely to accelerate us towards agi.
Also, there are several versions of it. The largest version is the
- 671b parameter version. There are two non-chinese providers offering it currently, though at a much higher cost than deepseek per million tokens. (see openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-r1)
- 70b version, available for free on groq.com
- 32b version and downwards can be run on consumer-grade hardware
