deepseek-r1-pure-rl-reasoning-jan-2025
IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/wiki-Large_language_model-chunk-5.md
Created 2026-08-24T17:11:17+00:00
DeepSeek-R1 (released January 2025) achieves reasoning performance comparable to OpenAI o1 using pure reinforcement learning without supervised fine-tuning, at approximately 95% lower cost
Summary
DeepSeek demonstrated in early 2025 that a model can reach frontier-level reasoning by leaning almost entirely on reinforcement learning, skipping the expensive supervised fine-tuning step the industry had treated as essential. This matters because it implies the recipe for top-tier reasoning is both simpler and dramatically cheaper than the prevailing playbook assumed, which could reshape how much compute, data, and expertise are actually needed to build competitive reasoning systems.