DeepSeek R-1, reasoning model of China’s AI startup is now available on Perplexity, to support deep web research

DeepSeek R1, the reasoning model of China’s AI startup which claims to offer performance on par with industry's leading models at a fraction of the cost, is now available on the US search engine startup Perplexity AI, and it will support deep web research.

“DeepSeek R1 is now available on Perplexity to support deep web research. There's a new Pro Search reasoning mode selector, along with OpenAI o1, with transparent chain of thought into model's reasoning,” said the company in a post on X.

“We're increasing the number of daily uses for both free and paid as add more capacity during the day. Stay tuned,” reads the post.

Further stating that DeepSeek on Perplexity is hosted in US/EU data centers, the company said, “Your data never leaves Western servers. The open source model is hosted completely independent of China. Your privacy and data security is our priority.”

A few hours ago, Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas congratulated DeepSeek AI for getting to #1 on the App Store and said, "For a while, it wasn't clear who would beat ChatGPT for the first time. The best we could manage was #8, a year ago. Look forward to using all their models for search, assistant, and agents this year.”

Meanwhile, reacting to a concern raised by an X user, Srinivas said, “All DeepSeek usage in Perplexity is through models hosted in data centers in the USA and Europe. DeepSeek is *open-source*. None of your data goes to China.”

Srinivas also shared a meme to show how the pro users of Perpliexity would react.

The DeepSeek-R1, released last week by a small Hangzhou-based startup founded in 2023, is 20 to 50 times cheaper to use than OpenAI o1 model, depending on the task, according to a post on DeepSeek's official WeChat account, reported Reuters.

Bloomberg reported that DeepSeek R1 is near or better than rival models in several leading benchmarks such as AIME 2024 for mathematical tasks, MMLU for general knowledge and AlpacaEval 2.0 for question-and-answer performance.