DeepSeek vs. Llama

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

Overview

Llama is Meta's open-weight model family. Llama 4 was its last major generation; Meta's active assistant-model development has shifted to Muse.

Meta introduced LLaMA in February 2023, helping catalyze the modern open-weight model ecosystem. Llama 2 added commercial use and chat tuning, while the Llama 3 series improved scale, multilingual support, and instruction following. Llama 4, released in April 2025, introduced native multimodality and a mixture-of-experts architecture. Meta subsequently shifted its actively promoted assistant-model line to the proprietary Muse family, but Llama models remain widely used and deployed.

Initial release: 2023-02-24

Current generation: Llama 4

Reference

https://www.llama.com/

Further Reading

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.13971
• https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4-multimodal-intelligence/