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DeepSeek vs. Phi

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

Phi

Phi

Overview

Phi is a series of compact language models developed by Microsoft using high-quality synthetic data and curated web content. Phi-3 and Phi-3.5 (2024) significantly raised the bar for small models, with the 3.8B Phi-3 Mini matching much larger open-source models on key benchmarks.


Phi-1 and Phi-2 are 1.3B and 2.7B parameter language models, respectively, developed by Microsoft to demonstrate the ability of smaller language models trained on high-quality data. In April 2024, Phi-3 was released across Mini (3.8B), Small (7B), and Medium (14B) sizes. Phi-3 Mini achieves performance competitive with Llama 3 8B and Mistral 7B at a fraction of the compute, making it ideal for edge and constrained-resource deployments. Phi-3.5 Mini and MoE followed in August 2024 with further improvements.


Initial release: 2023-06-20

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DeepSeek

Phi

Products & Features
Instruct Models
Coding Capability
Customization
Finetuning
Open Source
License MIT MIT
Model Sizes 67B, 671B 1.3B, 2.7B, 3.8B, 7B, 14B