Evaluating the Performance of DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3 Versus OpenAI Models in the Chinese National Medical Licensing Examination: Cross-Sectional Comparative Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Deepseek-R1, an open-source large language model (LLM), has generated significant global interest in the past months. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to compare the performance of DeepSeek and OpenAI LLMs on the Chinese National Medical Licensing Examination (NMLE) and evaluate their potential in medical education. METHODS: This cross-sectional study assessed 2 DeepSeek models (DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3), 3 OpenAI models (ChatGPT-o1 pro, ChatGPT-o3 mini, and GPT-4o), and 2 additional Chinese LLMs (ERNIE 4.5 Turbo and Qwen 3) using the 2021 NMLE. Model performance was evaluated based on overall accuracy, accuracy across question types (A1, A2, A3 and A4, and B1), case analysis and non-case analysis questions, medical specialties, and accuracy consensus between different model combinations. RESULTS: All LLMs successfully passed the NMLE. DeepSeek-R1 achieved the highest accuracy (573/597, 96%), followed by DeepSeek-V3 (558/600, 93%), both of which significantly outperformed ChatGPT-o1 pro (450/600, 75%), ChatGPT-o3 mini (455/600, 75.8%), and GPT-4o (452/600, 75.3%; P<.001 for all comparisons). Performance disparities were consistent across various question types (A1, A2, A3 and A4, and B1), case analysis and non-case analysis questions, different types of case analyses, and medical specialties. The accuracy consensus between DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3 reached 97.7% (544/557), significantly outperforming DeepSeek-R1 alone (P=.04). Two additional Chinese LLMs, ERNIE 4.5 Turbo (572/600, 95.3%) and Qwen 3 (555/600, 92.5%), also exhibited significantly better performance compared to the 3 OpenAI models (all P<.001). CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrates that DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3 significantly outperform OpenAI models on the NMLE. DeepSeek models show promise as tools for medical education and exam preparation in the Chinese language.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".