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Llama 3.1 405B vs DeepSeek R1

Meta
Llama 3.1 405B

Meta · 405B params · Quality: 88

DeepSeek
DeepSeek R1

DeepSeek · 671B params · Quality: 92

Architecture Comparison

SpecLlama 3.1 405BDeepSeek R1
TypeDENSEMOE
Total Parameters405B671B
Active Parameters405B37B
Layers12661
Hidden Dimension16,3847,168
Attention Heads128128
KV Heads81
Context Length131,072131,072
Precision (default)BF16BF16
Total ExpertsN/A256
Active ExpertsN/A8

Memory Requirements

PrecisionLlama 3.1 405BDeepSeek R1
BF16 Weights810.0 GB1342.0 GB
FP8 Weights405.0 GB671.0 GB
INT4 Weights202.5 GB335.5 GB
KV-Cache / Token516096 B31232 B
Activation Estimate5.00 GB3.00 GB

Minimum GPUs Needed (BF16)

H100 SXMN/AN/A
L40SN/AN/A

Quality Benchmarks

BenchmarkLlama 3.1 405BDeepSeek R1
Overall8892
MMLU88.690.8
HumanEval61.071.7
GSM8K96.897.3
MT-Bench88.089.0

Llama 3.1 405B

MMLU
88.6
HumanEval
61.0
GSM8K
96.8
MT-Bench
88.0

DeepSeek R1

MMLU
90.8
HumanEval
71.7
GSM8K
97.3
MT-Bench
89.0

Capabilities

FeatureLlama 3.1 405BDeepSeek R1
Tool Use✓ Yes✓ Yes
Vision✗ No✗ No
Code✓ Yes✓ Yes
Math✓ Yes✓ Yes
Reasoning✗ No✓ Yes
Multilingual✓ Yes✓ Yes
Structured Output✓ Yes✓ Yes

API Pricing Comparison

Cheapest Output (Llama 3.1 405B)

$3.00/M

Input: $3.00/M

Cheapest Output (DeepSeek R1)

$2.19/M

Input: $0.55/M

ProviderLlama 3.1 405B In $/MOut $/MDeepSeek R1 In $/MOut $/M
deepseek$0.55$2.19
fireworks$3.00$3.00
together$3.50$3.50$3.00$7.00

Recommendation Summary

  • DeepSeek R1 scores higher on overall quality (92 vs 88).
  • DeepSeek R1 is cheaper per output token ($2.19/M vs $3.00/M).
  • Llama 3.1 405B has a smaller memory footprint (810.0 GB vs 1342.0 GB BF16), making it easier to deploy on fewer GPUs.
  • Llama 3.1 405B uses DENSE architecture while DeepSeek R1 uses MOE. MoE models activate fewer parameters per token, improving inference efficiency.
  • DeepSeek R1 is stronger at code generation (HumanEval: 71.7 vs 61.0).
  • DeepSeek R1 is better at math reasoning (GSM8K: 97.3 vs 96.8).

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