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LLM Index

DeepSeek vs. Orca

A side-by-side comparison of release history, capabilities, licensing and model sizes.

Attribute DeepSeek Orca
Developer DeepSeek Microsoft
Current generation DeepSeek V4 –
Initial release 2023-11-29 2023-06-05
Instruct tuned Yes Yes
Coding Yes No
Finetuning Yes Yes
Open source Yes Yes
License MIT Noncommercial
Model sizes 284B (13B active), 1.6T (49B active) 13B
Links
Website Pricing
Website

DeepSeek

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.

Further reading

Orca

Orca is a descendant of LLaMA developed by Microsoft with finetuning on explanation traces obtained from GPT-4.

Orca-13B is a LLM developed by Microsoft. It is based on LLaMA with finetuning on complex explanation traces obtained from GPT-4. By using rich signals, Orca surpasses the performance of models such as Vicuna-13B on complex tasks. However, given its model backbone and the data used for its finetuning, Orca is under noncommercial use.

Further reading

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