DeepSeek R1: Open Reasoning Revolution
Narrative
Open-weights reasoning model matching o1 performance. Full chain-of-thought visible. Trained using RL without expensive human annotation. Costs fraction of Western models.
Reality
Benchmarks verified: 79.8% on AIME 2024 (vs o1's 79.2%), 97.3% on MATH-500. Reasoning traces show genuine problem decomposition. Downloaded 1M+ times in first week. Chinese efficiency shocked industry.
Implication
Democratized reasoning models overnight. Proved expensive proprietary training not required. Triggered market panic about Western AI moat. Reasoning became commodity within weeks. Challenged scaling law orthodoxy and massive training budget assumptions. Proved Chinese labs globally competitive. Open-source reasoning capabilities democratized. Sparked intense debate about AI development costs. Market-moving event.