In short DeepSeek R1 has nearly identical performance on benchmarks (AI tests with questions to determine their capabilities) as OpenAI o1 model, AND it's open

In short DeepSeek R1 has nearly identical performance on benchmarks (AI tests with questions to determine their capabilities) as OpenAI o1 model, AND it's open source (only the weights), AND it's more efficient to run (I think more than 50% cheaper to run in terms of computation, which means you pay less server costs). So it's just a much better option that is free and more efficient to run, and to add insult to injury it was apparently trained for much less than what OpenAI paid for o1. The cost of training is mostly irrelevant though because the model weights are available for free.