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DeepSeek vs. Llama 2

LLM Comparison


DeepSeek

DeepSeek

Overview

DeepSeek currently offers V3 and R1 models, both of which are highly efficient and performant. V3 is comparable to models such as Anthropic's Sonnet 3.5, while R1 is comparable to models such as OpenAI's o1.


DeepSeek is a Chinese startup that began releasing LLMs in 2023 with DeepSeek Coder. In rapid succession, DeepSeek has since released more powerful models, most notably releasing DeepSeek V3 at the end of 2024 and DeepSeek R1 at the beginning of 2025. DeepSeek V3 and R1 set the frontier in terms of efficiency while maintaining high performance. The release of V3 and R1 sent shockwaves through the US technology sector, especially given the low cost with which V3 and R1 were trained (orders of magnitude less than the cost of training equivalent US models.)


Initial release: 2023-11-29

Further Reading

Llama 2

Llama 2

Overview

Llama 2 is Meta AI's open source LLM available for both research and commercial use cases (assuming you're not one of the top consumer companies in the world).


The successor to LLaMA (henceforce "Llama 1"), Llama 2 was trained on 40% more data, has double the context length, and was tuned on a large dataset of human preferences (over 1 million such annotations) to ensure helpfulness and safety. It outperforms other open source models on both natural language understanding datasets as well as in head-to-head face-offs.


Initial release: 2023-07-18

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DeepSeek

Llama 2

Products & Features
Instruct Models
Coding Capability
Customization
Finetuning
Open Source
License MIT Custom (Commercial OK)
Model Sizes 67B, 671B 7B, 13B, 70B