Deepseek-R1 is at the level of GPT 4.1 already, it's open-weight, open-source and they even open-sourced their inference code.
I wonder whether you're actually running the proper DeepSeek-R1 model, or one of those lesser finetunes?
People sang praise from the roof for Google's Gemini 2.5 models, but in many things for me they can't even beat Deepseek V3.
In terms of code and science, Gemini is way, way too verbose in its output, and because of that it ends up getting confused by itself and hurting the quality of longer windows.
R1 does this too, but it poisons itself in the reasoning loop. You can see it during the streaming, literally criss-crossing its thoughts and thinking itself into loops before it finally arrives at an answer.
On top of that, both R1 and Gemini Pro / Flash are mediocre at anything creative. I can accept that from R1, since it's mainly meant as more of a "hard sciences" model, but Gemini is meant to be an all-purpose model.
If you pit Gemini, Deepseek R1 and Deepseek V3 against each other in a writing contest, V3 will blow both of them out of the water.
But in general 2.5 Pro is an extremely strong model. It may lose out in some respects to o3-pro, but o3-pro is so much slower that its utility tends to be limited by my own attention span. I don't think either would have much to fear from V3, though, except possibly in the area of short fiction composition.
GPT‑4.1 scores 54.6% on SWE-bench Verified, improving by 21.4%abs over GPT‑4o and 26.6%abs over GPT‑4.5—making it a leading model for coding.