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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 textbooks and synthetic data.


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. Despite its size and not having an instruct finetuned counterpart, the Phi-2 model is well-suited to research and experimentation given its size and MIT license.


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