DeepSeek R1

The Chinese AI lab's open-weight reasoning model that shocked the industry by matching frontier closed-source performance at a fraction of the training cost. DeepSeek R1 demonstrated that reasoning capabilities could emerge from reinforcement learning alone, without expensive supervised fine-tuning on chain-of-thought data. Its efficient training methodology and MIT license made it one of the most significant open-source AI releases of the 2025-2026 era.