China's DeepSeek Rolls Out New Update to Its Reasoning Model: Can It Outdo ChatGPT?

Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek released an update to its R1 reasoning model in the early hours of Thursday, stepping up competition with US rivals such as OpenAI. DeepSeek launched R1-0528 on the developer platform Hugging Face, but has yet to make an official public announcement. It did not publish a description of the model or comparisons.

Bloomberg earlier reported the update on Wednesday. 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 US 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 plummeting 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, originally planned for May. DeepSeek also released an upgrade to its V3 large language model in March.

Can it rival ChatGPT?

LiveCodeBench leaderboard, a benchmark developed by researchers from UC Berkeley, MIT, and Cornell, ranked DeepSeek's updated R1 reasoning model 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. So, the statistics already show DeepSeek's updated reasoning model is behind OpenAI's o4 mini and o3 models, meaning it might take more time to respond to complex questions. It may also not offer answers as good as ChatGPT based on either OpenAI models.

— With inputs

Read more: No Google? This Reddit Thread Points Out Why You Should Avoid Google Logins