Model Efficiency Milestone: DeepSeek R1 Was 25x Larger Than Gemma 4 Just One Year Ago at Comparable Performance

r/LocalLLaMA·medium signal

A 238-upvote r/LocalLLaMA post highlights that DeepSeek R1 launched roughly a year ago at 671B parameters as a MoE model, while Gemma 4's 26B MoE achieves comparable or better performance at 1/25th the size. With 42 comments, the community treats this as a concrete efficiency progress marker — 25x compression in one year — that makes local deployment of frontier-class reasoning accessible to consumer hardware.