DeepSeek R1 vs Llama 3.3 70B Instruct
DeepSeek R1 vs Llama 3.3 70B Instruct: Llama 3.3 70B Instruct is cheaper by 87% on average. DeepSeek R1 from Azure AI Foundry (128,000-token context, reasoning) vs. Llama 3.3 70B Instruct from Azure AI Foundry (128,000-token context, tool calls). Use Agent Command Center to A/B both in shadow mode and pick the winner per workload.
Side-by-side cost
Live workload comparison
Same workload run through both models. The cheaper one is highlighted.
3,000
0128,000
400
08,192
5,000
01,000,000
At this workload, Llama 3.3 70B Instruct is 61% cheaper than DeepSeek R1 — a savings of $578/month ($6,932/year).
Production recipe — Agent Command Center
strategy: cost-optimized
primary:
model: llama-3-3-70b-instruct
provider: azure-ai-foundry
fallback:
model: deepseek-r1
provider: azure-ai-foundry
shadow: { sample_rate: 0.05 } # mirror 5% of traffic to compare quality live| DeepSeek R1 | Llama 3.3 70B Instruct | |
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $1.35/M | $0.710/M |
| Output price | $5.40/M | $0.710/M |
| Context window | 128,000 | 128,000 |
| Max output | 8,192 | 2,048 |
| Function calling | — | ✓ |
| Vision | — | — |
| Audio input | — | — |
| Reasoning | ✓ | — |
| Prompt caching | — | — |
| Structured output | — | — |
| Pricing verified | May 12, 2026 | May 12, 2026 |
Benchmark comparison
Side-by-side public benchmark scores. Greener bar = winner.
Chatbot Arena ELOgeneral
DeepSeek R1
1,361
Llama 3.3 70B Instruct
1,268
HumanEvalcode
DeepSeek R1
89.7%
Llama 3.3 70B Instruct
88.4%
MMLU-Proreasoning
DeepSeek R1
84.0%
Llama 3.3 70B Instruct
68.9%