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Head to head

DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B vs QwQ-32B

DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B from DeepSeek against QwQ-32B from Alibaba Qwen — specification, price and every benchmark both makers have published, in one table.

Benchmarks

QwQ-32B leads

QwQ-32B wins 2 of the 2 benchmarks both models report, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B wins 0, consistently. The average gap across shared tests is 5.0 points.

Price

DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B is cheaper

On a 3:1 input-to-output mix, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B costs $0.135 per million tokens against $0.162 for QwQ-32B — about 1.2× less. Remember that a reasoning model bills its thinking as output, so cost per answer can diverge much further than cost per token.

What actually differs

  • These two are closely matched on the specification side — same broad capabilities, same licensing posture. The decision comes down to the benchmark rows and the price.

Scorecard

Which is better at what

Maths, coding, reasoning and the rest — one line each, averaged over the benchmarks both models actually report.

Which model scores higher in each capability category, averaged over the benchmarks all of them report.
CategoryDeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32BQwQ-32BBetter at this
ReasoningGPQA Diamond62.1%65.2%QwQ-32B+3.1
MathsAIME 202572.6%79.5%QwQ-32B+6.9
CodingOnly one model reports thisNot comparable
KnowledgeNeither model reports thisNot comparable
MultimodalNeither model reports thisNot comparable
Instruction followingNeither model reports thisNot comparable
Human preferenceNeither model reports thisNot comparable
Categories wonOut of 2 comparable02QwQ-32B

Each category averages only the benchmarks every model here reports, so no one is credited for a test the other did not run. A category with no shared test is marked Not comparable rather than guessed at.

Side by side

DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B and QwQ-32B, row by row

AttributeDeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32BDeepSeekQwQ-32BAlibaba Qwen
Specification
MakerWho built itDeepSeekAlibaba Qwen
Released2025-012025-03
ParametersTotal, and active per token for a mixture of experts32B32B
ArchitectureDense transformerDense transformer
Context windowHow much can go in at once131,072 tokens131,072 tokens
Max output32,768 tokens32,768 tokens
InputTextText
ReasoningSpends extra tokens thinking before it answersYesYes
Tool callingNoYes
LicenceMITApache 2.0
Open weightsCan you download and run it yourselfYesYes
Price
Input priceUSD per million tokens in$0.12$0.15
Output priceUSD per million tokens out$0.18$0.20
Blended 3:1A 3-in-to-1-out million-token mix — a fairer single number than input price alone$0.135Cheapest$0.162
Price noteOpen weights — this is a representative hosting rate, not a first-party price. Running it yourself costs only hardware.Open weights — this is a representative hosting rate, not a first-party price. Running it yourself costs only hardware.
Published benchmarks
GPQA Diamond198 graduate-level physics, chemistry and biology questions written to be Google-proof. PhD holders in the matching field score about 65%.62.1%65.2%Best
AIME 2025The American Invitational Mathematics Examination — 15 problems, integer answers, no partial credit. A standard test of multi-step maths reasoning.72.6%79.5%Best
MATH-500500 competition maths problems sampled from the MATH benchmark, graded on the final answer.94.3%Not reported
LiveCodeBenchCompetitive-programming problems collected after each model's training cutoff, so contamination cannot inflate the score.Not reported63.4%
LinksHugging Face · Full pageHugging Face · Full page
Row verified2026-082026-08

Where these numbers come from

Every score on this page is a published figure, taken from the model's own card, system card, technical report or release post, or from a public leaderboard. CorX Labs did not run these evaluations. Most are self-reported by the lab that built the model, which means they were produced under that lab's own choice of prompt, scaffold and number of attempts — so treat them as a starting point for a shortlist, not as a settled ranking.

A score someone other than the model's maker measured is marked Independent and names its measurer. Those are the stronger numbers on this page — an outside harness has no reason to flatter anyone — and there are not many of them.

Where a figure has not been published, the cell reads Not reported rather than an estimate. Nothing here is inferred, interpolated or guessed. Each model records the month its row was last checked. Full method and caveats.

Questions

DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B or QwQ-32B?

Is DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B better than QwQ-32B?

QwQ-32B wins 2 of the 2 benchmarks both models report, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B wins 0, consistently. The average gap across shared tests is 5.0 points.

Which is cheaper, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B or QwQ-32B?

On a 3:1 input-to-output mix, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B costs $0.135 per million tokens against $0.162 for QwQ-32B — about 1.2× less. Remember that a reasoning model bills its thinking as output, so cost per answer can diverge much further than cost per token.

What is the difference between DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B and QwQ-32B?

These two are closely matched on the specification side — same broad capabilities, same licensing posture. The decision comes down to the benchmark rows and the price.

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