Open-weight LLM comparison
DeepSeek R1 vs Gemma 2 27B
Side-by-side
Straight from each model's release page and Hugging Face card. Memory shown is for the weights alone: add roughly 15% for real serving. Bold column marks the more parameters and the smaller memory footprint.
| Field | DeepSeek R1 | Gemma 2 27B |
|---|---|---|
| Total parameters | 671 B | 27 B |
| Active parameters (MoE) | 37 B | — |
| Architecture | MoE (671B total, 37B active per token) | dense |
| Vendor | DeepSeek | |
| License | MIT | Gemma Terms of Use |
| Released | 2025-01-20 | 2024-06-27 |
| Weights @ FP16 | 1342 GB | 54 GB |
| Weights @ INT8 | 671 GB | 27 GB |
| Weights @ INT4 | 336 GB | 14 GB |
Which is smarter (published benchmarks)
Vendor-reported quality scores on the standard leaderboards. Bold column marks the higher score on the same test.
| Benchmark | DeepSeek R1 | Gemma 2 27B |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU (5-shot) | 90.8 | 75.2 |
| MATH (AIME 2024, pass@1) | 79.8 | not published |
| GPQA (Diamond) | 71.5 | not published |
| Codeforces (Elo) | 2029.0 | not published |
| HumanEval | not published | 51.8 |
| MATH (0-shot) | not published | 42.3 |
| GPQA | not published | 25.3 |
Sources: DeepSeek R1 model card · Gemma 2 27B model card. Benchmark methodology and prompt template can shift these numbers by several points, so treat these as relative rankings, not absolute scores.
Common questions
DeepSeek R1 vs Gemma 2 27B: which is bigger?
DeepSeek R1 has more parameters (DeepSeek R1: 671 B; Gemma 2 27B: 27 B). More parameters usually means higher ceiling on capability and higher memory requirement, though MoE architectures decouple total parameters from per-token compute.
DeepSeek R1 vs Gemma 2 27B: which is newer?
DeepSeek R1 released 2025-01-20; Gemma 2 27B released 2024-06-27.
DeepSeek R1 vs Gemma 2 27B: which needs less memory to serve?
Gemma 2 27B needs less HBM. Weights-only footprint at FP16: DeepSeek R1 1342 GB; Gemma 2 27B 54 GB. Half those numbers at INT8, quarter at INT4. Real serving adds 10-30% for KV cache.
DeepSeek R1 vs Gemma 2 27B: which license is more permissive?
DeepSeek R1: MIT. Gemma 2 27B: Gemma Terms of Use. Apache 2.0 and MIT allow unrestricted commercial use; Llama Community License allows commercial use but restricts training larger models on outputs; CC-BY-NC and vendor-specific licenses (Qwen 72B, Gemma) have narrower terms. Check the model card for the exact clauses.
See also: every LLM comparison · DeepSeek R1 full page · Gemma 2 27B full page.