ChatGPT vs. DeepSeek: Key Differences, Performance, and Which AI Model Suits Your Needs

02.08.2025

In the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence, two significant models have garnered substantial attention: OpenAI's ChatGPT and DeepSeek's R1. Although both are advanced language models, they differ in architecture, training methodologies, performance, and application focus.

Architectural Differences

ChatGPT is built upon OpenAI's GPT-4o architecture, adhering to a dense model design with approximately 1.8 trillion parameters. The architecture allows for flexibility on a wide range of tasks, ranging from natural language understanding to text generation and multimodal fusion. An architecture as comprehensive as this, however, demands massive computational resources for both training and inference.

In contrast, DeepSeek's R1 is an MoE model with 671 billion parameters but uses only 37 billion for every query. This selective use enhances computational efficiency since the model can dynamically allocate resources based on the task. This allows DeepSeek to match the performance of larger models but with reduced computational cost.

Training Methodologies and Effectiveness

The training of ChatGPT necessitated large-scale computational resources, with estimates suggesting the cost to be upwards of $100 million. Although this facilitated the model's expansive capabilities, it also speaks to the significant infrastructure requirements.

DeepSeek's R1, meanwhile, was trained for 55 days on 2,048 Nvidia H800 GPUs, at a cost estimated to be $5.5 million. This cost-effectiveness is a result of the MoE architecture and optimized training processes, demonstrating that AI models with high performance can be attained with relatively limited resources.

Performance and Application Focus

ChatGPT excels at generating coherent and contextually relevant text and is therefore well-suited to applications such as content generation, customer support, and general chatbots. It owes its capacity for understanding and generating human-like language to its large training data and dense model architecture.

DeepSeek's R1 is particularly good at structured reasoning tasks such as mathematical problem-solving and programming. While AI-powered tools like ChatGPT and DeepSeek revolutionize a variety of industries, Game Space Creator utilizes the power of AI to streamline board game design, making game creation faster, more creative, and accessible to everyone. Give it a try!