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Don’t Fall for False DeepSeek R1 News! Let’s Set the Record Straight

Emad Dehnavi
3 min readJan 27, 2025

DeepSeek R1 has been making waves recently, becoming the talk of the AI world with its groundbreaking capabilities. But with fame comes a flood of misinformation. Many “hot takes” about DeepSeek R1 floating around are inaccurate or downright misleading. Let’s clarify what DeepSeek R1 is, what it isn’t, and why it’s a truly remarkable achievement in AI.

Don’t Fall for False DeepSeek R1 News! Let’s Set the Record Straight

1. The $6M Training Myth: Not the Full Picture

You might have heard claims that DeepSeek R1’s training cost only ~$6M. That’s far from accurate. While the compute for the base model (no reinforcement learning) was equivalent to GPU hours worth $5.5M, this figure excludes critical factors like:

  • Ablation studies
  • Smaller experimental runs
  • Data generation efforts
  • Full-scale training runs for DeepSeek R1

When all these components are factored in, the real cost far surpasses the $6M figure circulating online. This wasn’t a budget operation by any means!

2. Not Just a Side Project: High-Flyer’s Billion-Dollar Backing

DeepSeek R1 didn’t magically appear as the product of a small research lab or a group of…

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Emad Dehnavi
Emad Dehnavi

Written by Emad Dehnavi

With 8 years as a software engineer, I write about AI and technology in a simple way. My goal is to make these topics easy and interesting for everyone.

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