A Berkeley AI Research team led by PhD candidate Jiayi Pan has achieved what many thought impossible: reproducing DeepSeek R1-Zero's key technologies for less than the cost of a dinner for two. Their success in implementing sophisticated reasoning capabilities in small language models marks a significant democratization of AI research.Key achievements:Successful replication under $30Complex reasoning in small models (1.5B parameters)Performance comparable to larger systemsUsing the countdown gam...