DeepSeek’s updated R1 reasoning AI model might be getting the bulk of the AI community’s attention this week. But the Chinese AI lab also released a smaller, “distilled” version of its new R1, DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B, that DeepSeek claims beats comparably sized models on certain benchmarks.

The new version can reportedly perform on par with competitors such as o3 from OpenAI and Gemini 2.5 Pro from Google.

DeepSeek’s R1 model gets an update with major improvements in reasoning and output, signaling China’s growing influence in the global AI race.