DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B vs Llama 3.1 8B: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Pricing verified Apr 20, 2026By LLMversusUpdated June 14, 2026View methodology

⚡ Quick Answer

Compare DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B and Llama 3.1 8B across pricing, benchmarks, and capabilities.

Updated: April 20, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70BLlama 3.1 8B
ProviderDeepSeekMeta
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.700$0.020
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.800$0.050
Context Window
128K
128K
Max Output Tokens
8,192
4,096
Arena ELO
1,250
1,120
Coding ELO1,240N/A
TTFT (ms)
150
150
Tokens/sec
100
100
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoNo
When to Use DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B

DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B excels at reasoning, coding, general-purpose tasks.

Strengths:

  • Strong reasoning
  • Large model capacity
  • Good balance

Best for:

reasoningcodinggeneral-purpose
When to Use Llama 3.1 8B

Llama 3.1 8B excels at cost-effective, fast-inference tasks.

Strengths:

  • Very cheap
  • Super fast
  • Good for lightweight tasks

Best for:

cost-effectivefast-inference

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