DeepSeek vs. Vicuna

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

Reference

https://www.deepseek.com/

Further Reading

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/