Development on the first DeepSeek R1 clone might have started with the announcement of the Open-R1 open-source project.

Microsoft is bringing Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s R1 model to its Azure AI Foundry platform and GitHub today. The R1 model, which has rocked US financial markets this week because it can be trained at a fraction of the cost of leading models from OpenAI,

The AI community is rightfully buzzing about the new model DeepSeek R1 and is racing to digest what it means. Created by DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup that emerged from the High-Flyer hedge fund, their flagship model shows performance comparable to models in OpenAI’s o1 series on key reasoning benchmarks,