TinyZero: Reproduce DeepSeek R1-Zero for $30

**DeepSeek Mania** continues to reshape the frontier model landscape with Jiayi Pan from Berkeley reproducing the *OTHER* result from the DeepSeek R1 paper, R1-Zero, in a cost-effective Qwen model fine-tune for two math tasks. A key finding is a lower bound to the distillation effect at **1.5B parameters**, with RLCoT reasoning emerging as an intrinsic property. Various RL techniques like PPO, DeepSeek's GRPO, or PRIME show similar outcomes, and starting from an Instruct model speeds convergence. The **Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE) Benchmark** introduces a challenging multi-modal test with **3,000 expert-level questions** across **100+ subjects**, where models perform below **10%**, with **DeepSeek-R1** achieving **9.4%**. DeepSeek-R1 excels in chain-of-thought reasoning, outperforming models like **o1** while being **20x cheaper** and MIT licensed. The **WebDev Arena Leaderboard** ranks DeepSeek-R1 #2 in technical domains and #1 under Style Control, closing in on **Claude 3.5 Sonnet**. OpenAI's **Operator** is deployed to 100% of Pro users in the US, enabling tasks like ordering meals and booking reservations, and functions as a research assistant for AI paper searches and summaries. Hugging Face announces a leadership change after significant growth, while Meta AI releases the first stable version of **Llama Stack** with streamlined upgrades and automated verification. DeepSeek-R1's open-source success is celebrated, and technical challenges like memory management on macOS 15+ are addressed with residency sets in MLX for stability.