DeepSeek V3 vs GPT-4o
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •DeepSeek V3 is meaningfully stronger at math (78 vs 62 on our capability index).
- •GPT-4o is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (80 vs 10).
- •DeepSeek V3 is open-weights (free to self-host); GPT-4o is paid API only.
- •DeepSeek V3 has a 128K tokens context window vs 128,000 tokens (16,384 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| DeepSeek V3 | GPT-4o | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | OpenAI |
| Type | Open source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓128K tokens | 128,000 tokens (16,384 max output) |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓Free (self-host) | $2.50 |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | $10.00 |
| Release date | 2024-12 | 2024-05 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V3 | GPT-4o |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-training scale | ~15T tokens | - |
| MMLU | - | 88.7% |
| HumanEval | - | 90.2% |
| MATH | - | 76.6% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose DeepSeek V3 if...
- →You want a proven, stable open model with broad ecosystem support
- →You need to self-host or fine-tune without licensing friction
- →Cost is critical and you don't need V4's 1M context or top scores
- →You want reproducible open-weight behavior pinned to a known version
Choose GPT-4o if...
- →Everyday assistant, drafting, summarization, and classification tasks
- →Latency- and cost-sensitive applications at scale
- →Multimodal tasks needing image understanding with fast responses