DeepSeek vs. Grok

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

Grok is the proprietary model family available through xAI's products and API. Grok 4.5 is the current generation, focused on coding, agentic tasks, reasoning, and knowledge work.

xAI introduced Grok in November 2023 and released the weights for Grok-1 under Apache 2.0 in March 2024. Later generations are proprietary and available through Grok, X, and the xAI API. Grok 4.5, released in July 2026, is xAI's current flagship model for software engineering, tool-driven agents, complex reasoning, and professional knowledge work.

Initial release: 2023-11-05

Current generation: Grok 4.5

Reference

https://x.ai/news/grok-4-5

Further Reading

• https://github.com/xai-org/grok-1/tree/main
• https://x.ai/news/grok-4-5