Learn DeepSeek R1 in 5 Minutes Watch | BEFORE It's TOO LATE!

If you want to use DeepSeek R1 to write code, solve math, draft content, and automate research at zero cost, you can be productive in the next five minutes — without a credit card, a waitlist, or a paid plan. I've tested it head-to-head against ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini across real client workflows, and the gap is smaller than most people assume.

Direct Answer: What DeepSeek R1 Is

DeepSeek R1 is an open-source reasoning model released by Chinese AI lab DeepSeek in January 2025 that matches or beats OpenAI's o1 on math, coding, and logic benchmarks while being free to use through chat.deepseek.com and roughly 27x cheaper through its API. It's the first frontier-grade reasoning model published with open weights under the MIT license, which means anyone can download it, run it locally, fine-tune it, or deploy it commercially without paying licensing fees. For everyday users, that translates into ChatGPT-o1-level intelligence available in a browser, on a phone, or self-hosted — at a price point that breaks the existing AI cost curve.

Why DeepSeek R1 Matters Right Now

The numbers tell the story. R1 scores 79.8% on AIME 2024 (vs o1's 79.2%), 97.3% on MATH-500, and 96.3 percentile on Codeforces. On the API side, DeepSeek charges roughly $0.55 per million input tokens and $2.19 per million output tokens — compared to OpenAI o1's $15 / $60. For an agency running automated content workflows or a real estate operator running daily lead-qualification agents, that's a 27x cost reduction with comparable output quality.

I run training and consulting for 79,000+ students globally, and within a week of R1 launching I had to update three of my courses because the cost equations students had memorized were no longer valid. That's how big a shift this is.

How to Access DeepSeek R1 in 60 Seconds

You have four free entry points, in order of friction:

• Web chat: Go to chat.deepseek.com, sign up with email or Google, toggle on "DeepThink (R1)" below the chat box. That's it — unlimited free messages, no usage cap I've hit yet.
• Mobile app: DeepSeek's iOS and Android apps are free. The iOS app briefly hit #1 on the US App Store in late January 2025.
• API: platform.deepseek.com gives you a $5 free trial credit. The endpoint is OpenAI-compatible, so you can swap your base_url and existing scripts will work.
• Local install: Distilled versions (1.5B, 7B, 14B, 32B, 70B parameters) run on a laptop via Ollama with one command: ollama run deepseek-r1:7b. The 7B model runs comfortably on a 16GB MacBook.

The One Feature That Changes Everything: Visible Reasoning

Toggle DeepThink on and DeepSeek R1 shows you its full chain of thought before giving the final answer. ChatGPT o1 hides this; R1 exposes every step. For learners, this is gold — you don't just get an answer, you watch the model reason. As a Chartered Accountant by training, I use this constantly to audit financial logic: I paste a client's P&L, ask R1 to flag inconsistencies, and the visible reasoning makes it easy to spot where the model misread a row instead of guessing whether the conclusion is right.

Practical use: when R1 gets a problem wrong, you can read the trace, identify the exact step where it went off, and rewrite your prompt to fix that step. With closed reasoning models, you're prompting blind.

Five Real Workflows Where DeepSeek R1 Beats ChatGPT for Me

• Course outline generation: I feed R1 a list of 30 student questions from one of my Udemy courses and ask it to cluster them into a curriculum. It produces tighter groupings than GPT-4o, and the reasoning trace shows which questions it nearly grouped together — useful for spotting overlap.
• SEO content briefs: R1 writes structured H2/H3 outlines that match search intent better than Claude Sonnet 3.5 for technical topics, particularly anything math-heavy or code-heavy.
• Code debugging: Paste a 200-line Python script with a bug, ask "why is the output wrong on row 47?". R1's reasoning trace finds the bug in plain English, not just a fix.
• Financial modeling: Multi-step DCF and unit-economics calculations — exactly the kind of problem where step-by-step reasoning prevents hallucinated arithmetic.
• Translation with nuance: Hindi, Arabic, and Mandarin translations where context matters. R1 reasons about cultural register before writing.

What DeepSeek R1 Is Not Good At

Be honest about the limits. R1 has weaker multimodal support than GPT-4o — no native image generation, image input is limited. It refuses to discuss certain politically sensitive topics related to China, which matters if you're doing journalism or policy research. The web chat occasionally drops connections during high-traffic periods. And while the open-weight model is permissive, the hosted version's privacy terms send your data to servers in China — a hard no for some clients I work with in regulated industries.

My rule: use R1 hosted for non-sensitive work; for client data, run the distilled model locally via Ollama or use a US-hosted API provider like Together AI or Fireworks that serves DeepSeek R1 weights from US infrastructure.

Three Prompts to Try in the Next Five Minutes

• Math test: "Solve: a train leaves Mumbai at 6am at 80 km/h, another leaves Delhi at 7am at 100 km/h on the same track 1,400 km apart. When and where do they meet? Show every step." R1 will lay out the full setup before solving.
• Code test: "Write a Python function that takes a list of dicts and returns the top 3 by a given key, handling ties by alphabetical order. Include test cases." R1 will explain edge-case decisions before coding.
• Strategy test: "I run a $49/month course business with 8% monthly churn. What's the single highest-leverage change to make first?" R1 will reason through LTV math before recommending.

DeepSeek R1 collapses the cost of frontier-grade reasoning by 27x and exposes the chain of thought that closed models hide — which makes it both cheaper and more teachable. Open chat.deepseek.com right now, toggle DeepThink on, and run one of the three prompts above against your current AI tool of choice. The comparison will tell you everything you need to know in under five minutes.

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Keep Learning

If this was useful, these are worth reading next:

• ChatGPT for Business: The Complete Guide (2026)
• How to Automate Your Business with AI (No Coding Required)
• Or go further with the AI Mastery Course — used by 79,000+ students across 150+ countries.

Model	Free Tier	API Input / Output (per 1M tokens)	AIME 2024 Score	Open Weights
DeepSeek R1	Unlimited at chat.deepseek.com	$0.55 / $2.19	79.8%	Yes (MIT)
OpenAI o1	Limited via ChatGPT Plus ($20/mo)	$15.00 / $60.00	79.2%	No
OpenAI o3-mini	Limited via ChatGPT free tier	$1.10 / $4.40	87.3%	No
Claude 3.5 Sonnet	Limited at claude.ai	$3.00 / $15.00	16.0% (not a reasoning model)	No
Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking	Free via AI Studio	$0.10 / $0.40 (experimental)	73.3%	No

Sources: DeepSeek API Pricing, OpenAI Pricing, Anthropic Pricing, Google AI Pricing. Benchmark scores from each vendor's official release notes as of Q1 2025.