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LLM Index

DeepSeek vs. Phi

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

Attribute DeepSeek Phi
Developer DeepSeek Microsoft
Current generation DeepSeek V4 Phi-4
Initial release 2023-11-29 2023-06-20
Instruct tuned Yes Yes
Coding Yes Yes
Finetuning Yes Yes
Open source Yes Yes
License MIT MIT
Model sizes 284B (13B active), 1.6T (49B active) 3.8B, 5.6B, 14B
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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

Phi

Phi is Microsoft's family of compact open models designed for efficient local and edge deployment. Phi-4 is the current generation.

Microsoft introduced Phi-1 and Phi-2 to demonstrate how carefully curated and synthetic training data can make small models unusually capable. Phi-3 expanded the family for mobile and multimodal use. The Phi-4 generation includes a 14B general model and reasoning variants, plus smaller and multimodal checkpoints. Phi models are released under the MIT license and are designed for research, local inference, and resource-constrained production workloads.

Further reading

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