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.

They mopped the floor in terms of transparency, even more so in terms of performance × transparency

Long term that might matter more

DeepSeek made OpenAI panic, they initially hid the CoT for o1 and then rushed to release o3 instead of waiting for GPT-5.

I disagree. I find myself constantly going to their free offering which was able to solve lots of coding tasks that 3.7 could not.

counterpoint: influencers said they wiped the floor with everyone so it must have happened