Side-by-side comparison of DBRX Instruct (Databricks · USA) and DeepSeek R1 (DeepSeek · China) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. DBRX Instruct is rated conditional; DeepSeek R1 is conditional. They part ways on licence: DBRX Instruct is "Databricks Open", DeepSeek R1 is "MIT".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | Conditional 132B MoE (36B active). Databricks Open Model License is bespoke — allows commercial use with acceptable-use policy and a 700M-MAU-style cap. Read the licence carefully; not Apache 2.0. | Conditional Frontier reasoning model at o1-class performance. MIT licence makes weights legally clean. Same Chinese-origin alignment/supply-chain considerations as DeepSeek V3. Distilled Qwen/Llama versions inherit their base licence. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-15 | 2026-04-15 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | Databricks Open | MIT |
| Commercial use | With caps | Yes |
| Training data | Undisclosed | Undisclosed |
| Origin | USA | China |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 8/100 | 27/100 |
| Speed | — | — |
| Blended price | — | $2.36/M |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.