DeepSeek never mopped the floor with anyone... DeepSeek was remarkable because it is claimed that they spent a lot less training it, and without Nvidia GPUs, and because they had the best open weight model for a while. The only area they mopped the floor in was open source models, which had been stagnating for a while. But qwen3 mopped the floor with DeepSeek R1.
I think qwen3:R1 is apples:oranges, if you mean the 32B models. R1 has 20x the parameters and likely roughly as much knowledge about the world. One is a really good general model, while you can run the other one on commodity hardware. Subjectively, R1 is way better at coding, and Qwen3 is really good only at benchmarks - take a look at aider‘s leaderboard, it’s not even close: https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/
R2 could turn out really really good, but we‘ll see.
I think he is hinting at folks like you who say things like Deepseek mopping the floor when beyond some contribution to the open source community which was indeed impressive, there really has been not much of a change. No floors were mopped.
Do people actually believe this? While I agree their open source contribution was impressive, I never got the sense they mopped the floor. Perhaps firms in China may be using some of their models but beyond learnings in the community, no dents in the market were made for the West.
