In early January 2025, DeepSeek-R1 emerged as a leading AI model for problem-solving, creative writing, advanced reasoning, and coding. Within a short period, many people have been involved in the magic of DeepSeek-R1. However, people who are interested in Grok 3 might be questioning whether it’s worthwhile to embark on a new journey with DeepSeek-R1.
When deciding which one to use, you may look for a comprehensive comparison of these two models. In this article, we’ll show you a detailed comparison of DeepSeek-R1 and Grok 3. Let’s get started and better understand these two amazing AI models.
What Is DeepSeek?
Founded in 2023, DeepSeek is a cutting-edge AI platform that aims to provide affordable and open-source AI solutions to businesses and developers. Over the past two years, it has achieved over 10 million downloads on Google Play and outperformed ChatGPT on the iOS App Store.
One of its popular AI models - DeepSeek V3 has achieved impressive performances in AI benchmarks. It acquired a 90.2 score for MATH-500. Besides, you can also see the great potential of its latest version - DeepSeek-R1. It comes with powerful reasoning capabilities. And the training cost per run is only $6 million, significantly lower than that of other AI competitors.
What Is Grok 3?
Grok 3 is the newest model from x.AI by Elon Musk. It was regarded as by himself the “smartest AI on Earth” because of its advanced reasoning and big computing capabilities.
It was trained on the Colossus supercomputer which has 200,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, and 200 million GPU hours of computing. This represents a tenfold increase in computing power compared to Grok 2.
Grok 3 has crushed AI benchmarks, 93% on AIME 25. It has 2.7 trillion params and was trained on 12.8 trillion tokens. As its context window can handle 128,000 tokens, it can sustain long conversations and tackle complex problems.
Grok 3 Vs DeepSeek-R1 - Which Is Better?
Both Grok 3 and DeepSeek-R1 have undergone significant development before arriving on the scene, competing with many other AI chatbots. At the crossroads, you might be thinking which one to use between Grok 3 and DeepSeek-R1. Here, we will determine the key differences between Grok 3 and DeepSeek-R1.
In this comparison, we will compare the strengths and weaknesses of Grok 3 and DeepSeek-R1, looking at their functionalities, performance, and best uses. As a data scientist, developer, or business analyst, you can make informed choices in your AI journey.
First of all, let’s see some criteria in the AI benchmark. These scores can reflect their capabilities in mathematical reasoning, answering complex scientific questions, generating codes, and overall performance.
AI Benchmark Performance
GrAIME 2025 (American Invitational Mathematics Exam)
- DeepSeek-R1: 79.8% accuracy
- Grok 3: 93% accuracy
- DeepSeek-R1 Vs Grok 3: Grok 3 significantly outperforms DeepSeek-R1 in mathematical reasoning.
GPQA Science (Graduate-Level Physics Question Answering)
- DeepSeek-R1: 71.5% accuracy
- Grok 3: 85% accuracy
- DeepSeek-R1 Vs Grok 3: Grok 3 demonstrates better performance in GPQA Science, which means Grok 3 has stronger proficiency in answering complex scientific questions.
LiveCodeBench (Code Generation)
- DeepSeek-R1: 65.9% Pass@1-CoT score
- Grok 3: 79% Pass@1-CoT score
- DeepSeek-R1 Vs Grok 3: Grok 3 outperforms DeepSeek-R1 in code generation tasks. This indicates that Grok 3 shows better capabilities in generating code.
Chatbot Arena (Overall Chatbot Performance)
- DeepSeek-R1: Not mentioned yet, but it should be among the top competitors.
- Grok 3: Achieved 1402 scores. It’s the first AI model to break the 1400 barrier.
- DeepSeek-R1 Vs Grok 3: Grok 3 is the top performer on Chatbot Arena, outperforming DeepSeek-R1.
Next, we’ll explain each index with some examples and make a comparison between Grok 3 and DeepSeek-R1.
Reasoning and Math
Both Grok 3 and DeepSeek-R1 are good at reasoning. In certain reasoning problems, both models can correct responses with sound reasoning. For example, in a challenging logic puzzle of determining who is lying among three people, Grok 3 provided step-by-step detailed reasoning, and DeepSeek-R1 also arrived at the correct answer. Numerically, the two models performed equally well on less complex problems but were lacking for more complex, multi-step problems. Overall, they are generally even in these regards.
Coding
Grok 3 beats DeepSeek-R1 at coding. Grok 3 generates functional code that is cleaner and briefer each time. Sometimes, DeepSeek-R1 fails to generate code that won't pass even basic test cases. For instance, when asked to write a maze, DeepSeek-R1 generated a maze that was well laid out, while Grok 3's output was less visually clear and appeared more random. This means that Grok 3 is the better one for coding work.
Creative Writing
Both of the models can make creative writing. However, Grok 3’s output has more enhanced flow and more engaging stories. For instance, when asked to write a story about a man who buys a typewriter, Grok 3 wrote a superior and more engrossing story than DeepSeek-R1 did. This makes Grok 3 a better option when you need to create an interesting story.
Applications
- DeepSeek-R1: DeepSeek-R1 is particularly designed to apply in areas such as reasoning, research, and knowledge automation.
- Grok 3: You can use Grok 3 to perform demanding computational tasks and real-time data analysis. It does well in coding, real-time personalization, and learning and adapting.
API Pricing
DeepSeek-R1 is much more cost-effective than Grok 3.
- DeepSeek-R1: $0.07 per million input tokens and $1.10 per million output tokens
- Grok 3: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens
Bonus: Use DeepSeek for Free at HIX AI
If you seek to take advantage of DeepSeek-R1 for free, you can use it on the HIX AI platform. Here, you can get smoother access to DeepSeek with no usage limit. can also avoid encountering DeepSeek server errors when there is high traffic.
Despite DeepSeek-R1, you can also access various other latest AI models such as Claude 3.7 Sonnet, OpenAI o3-mini, and GPT-4o for free. This means you can use different models to resolve problems, draft articles, establish codes, perform reasoning tasks, and work on other activities at one place.
Conclusion
In summary, the comparison between DeepSeek-R1 and Grok 3 shows that each of them has distinct strengths and weaknesses. Grok 3, with its gigantic processing capabilities and real-time data access, excels in jobs requiring heavy processing and quick adjustments to new data. It’s less able in logical deduction and problem-solving than DeepSeek-R1.
On the other hand, DeepSeek-R1 is superior at structured reasoning, academic research, and business uses. More importantly, DeepSeek-R1 has a great balance between performance and energy consumption. Therefore, it’s a more affordable and reliable choice than Grok 3. To try the latest DeepSeek-R1 without errors or limitations, you’re highly recommended to try DeepSeek-R1 at HIX.AI.