OpenAI o4-mini vs DeepSeek R1: Closed vs Open Reasoning on a Budget

OpenAI o4-miniDeepSeek R1
arenaElo13621389
humanEval88.690.2
sweBench6049.2
mmlu85.490.8
gpqa74.271.5
aime9279.8
Price in/out ($/M)$1.1 / $4.4$0.55 / $2.19

Our verdict

DeepSeek R1 still wins on GPQA and is open-weights; o4-mini is better integrated, slightly faster and easier to productionize. R1 for research and self-host; o4-mini for polished cloud deployments.

OpenAI o4-mini · DeepSeek R1 · All AI model comparisons