When DeepSeek released R1 in January 2025, it sent shockwaves through the AI world. Here was a model from a Chinese startup that could match OpenAI's o1 in reasoning — at a fraction of the cost.
Benchmark Results
On the MATH benchmark, DeepSeek R1 scores 97.3%, compared to GPT-4o's 76.6%. On coding tasks (Codeforces rating), R1 achieves 2,029, putting it in the top 0.2% of competitive programmers worldwide.
But where R1 truly shines is in its reasoning transparency. Unlike OpenAI's o1, which hides its chain-of-thought, DeepSeek R1 shows you exactly how it arrives at answers — making it invaluable for education, debugging, and verification.
Pricing Comparison
This is where it gets interesting. GPT-4o costs $2.50/$10.00 per million input/output tokens. DeepSeek R1 costs just $0.55/$2.19 — that's roughly 4-5x cheaper for input and 4-5x cheaper for output.
For a developer processing 10 million tokens per month, that's the difference between $100+ on GPT-4o and $25 on DeepSeek R1. Scale that to a startup processing 100M tokens, and you're looking at $1,000/month vs $250/month.
When to Use Each
Choose DeepSeek R1 when you need: complex reasoning, math, coding, cost optimization. Choose GPT-4o when you need: multimodal (image) inputs, function calling reliability, ecosystem integrations.
Conclusion
DeepSeek R1 isn't just a cheaper alternative — in many reasoning tasks, it's actually better. The question isn't whether to switch, but how to access it easily from outside China. That's exactly what OriAI solves.