DeepSeek vs. Vicuna

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

Released alongside Koala, Vicuna is one of many descendants of the Meta LLaMA model trained on dialogue data collected from the ShareGPT website. According to the authors, Vicuna achieves more than 90% of ChatGPT's quality in user preference tests, while vastly outperforming Alpaca. As of May 2023, Vicuna seems to be the heir apparent of the instruct-finetuned LLaMA model family, though it is also restricted from commercial use.

Initial release: 2023-03-30

Reference

https://vicuna.lmsys.org/

Further Reading

• https://lmsys.org/blog/2023-03-30-vicuna/