Chinese AI startup DeepSeek pushes US rivals with R1 model upgrade

Company quietly puts out latest version of low-cost AI model that surprised the West

20250529N deepseek screen

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek released an update to its R1 reasoning model. © Reuters

SHANGHAI/BEIJING (Reuters) -- Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek released the first update to its hit R1 reasoning model in the early hours of Thursday, stepping up competition with U.S. rivals such as OpenAI.

DeepSeek said via developer platform Hugging Face that R1-0528 was a minor version upgrade of R1 that nevertheless significantly improved its depth of reasoning and inference capabilities, including better handling of complex tasks, bringing its performance closer to OpenAI's o3 reasoning models and Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro.

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