Alpaca vs. DeepSeek

Overview

Alpaca is an instruction-finetuned LLM based off of LLaMA.

The first of many instruct-finetuned versions of LLaMA, Alpaca is an instruction-following model introduced by Stanford researchers. Impressively, with only $600 of compute spend, the researchers demonstrated that on qualitative benchmarks Alpaca performed similarly to OpenAI's text-davinci-003, a significantly larger model.

Initial release: 2023-03-13

Reference

https://crfm.stanford.edu/2023/03/13/alpaca.html

Further Reading

Overview

DeepSeek develops open-weight mixture-of-experts models for reasoning, coding, agents, and efficient long-context inference. DeepSeek V4 is the current generation.

DeepSeek began releasing language models in 2023 with DeepSeek Coder, then gained broad adoption with DeepSeek V3 and the R1 reasoning model in 2024 and 2025. DeepSeek V4, released in April 2026, includes a 284B-parameter Flash model with 13B active parameters and a 1.6T-parameter Pro model with 49B active parameters. Both support one-million-token context windows and are released with open weights under the MIT license.

Initial release: 2023-11-29

Current generation: DeepSeek V4

Reference

https://www.deepseek.com/

Further Reading

• https://api-docs.deepseek.com/news/news260424/
• https://huggingface.co/collections/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4