Just came across this nice technical breakdown of what, exactly, R1 accomplished. Interesting news to me was that they had to bypass CUDA entirely and write optimizations in PDX. Good complementary reading if you're here from my DeepSeek post.
While I've been traveling, little-known Chinese research lab Deepseek released an open-source model that can compete with the best closed-source products OpenAI and Anthropic have to offer. Everyone appears to be freaking out about it.
The reason for this is its astonishingly low training cost compared to performance (it reportedly cost $5 million dollars to train), the fact that it's open-source, and even if you choose to pay for its API, it's about 90% cheaper than its American competitors. The model is also available to try for free immediately. This is all possible because of how much cheaper the