LLMilestonesA milestone timeline of AI and large language models

Act V · Reasoning and agents

Open modelDeepSeek

DeepSeek-R1: an open reasoning model

Open-sourced under MIT, with reasoning on par with o1 and its full thinking visible.

MITlicense, free for commercial use and distillation

Why it matters

Its R1-Zero variant showed that reasoning can emerge from pure reinforcement learning. It topped the US App Store and shook the industry.

Costs and controversy

On January 27, Nvidia fell about 17% in a single day, wiping out nearly $600B of market value.

Built on

o1DeepSeek-V3

Led to

Qwen3Kimi K2DeepSeek-V4R1 in Nature

Source: arxiv.org ↗

See it on the 3D timeline →