Chinese AI startup DeepSeek quietly rolled out an updated version of its R1 reasoning model early Thursday, intensifying its rivalry with U.S. companies like OpenAI.
The new model, R1-0528, was released on the developer platform Hugging Face, although the company has not yet issued an official announcement or provided details or performance comparisons.
However, according to the LiveCodeBench leaderboard a benchmark created by researchers from UC Berkeley, MIT, and Cornell, DeepSeek's updated R1 reasoning model ranked just slightly behind OpenAI's o4 mini and o3 reasoning models on code generation and ahead of xAI's Grok 3 mini and Alibaba's Qwen 3, reports Reuters.
Bloomberg earlier reported the update on Wedneday. It said that a DeepSeek representative had told a WeChat group that it had completed what it described as a "minor trial upgrade" and that users could start testing it.
DeepSeek earlier this year upended beliefs that U.S. export controls were holding back China's AI advancements after the startup released AI models that were on a par or better than industry-leading models in the United States at a fraction of the cost.
The launch of R1 in January sent tech shares outside China plummetting in January and challenged the view that scaling AI requires vast computing power and investment.
Since R1's release, Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent have released models claiming to surpass DeepSeek's.
Google's Gemini has introduced discounted tiers of access while OpenAI cut prices and released an o3 Mini model that relies on less computing power.
The company is still widely expected to release R2, a successor to R1. Reuters reported in March, citing sources, that R2's release was initially planned for May. DeepSeek also released an upgrade to its V3 large language model in March.
Bd-pratidin English/ Afia
