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

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.

In a WeChat post on Wednesday morning, the Chinese startup DeepSeek announced the introduction of an improved version of its