DeepSeek’s new AI model inches closer to OpenAI’s best, surpasses Grok and Qwen
Chinese startup’s surprise update intensifies U.S.-China AI rivalry with stealth release on Hugging Face.
Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek released an update to its R1 reasoning model in the early hours of Thursday, intensifying competition with U.S. rivals such as OpenAI.
The updated model, R1-0528, was quietly launched on the developer platform Hugging Face, although DeepSeek has yet to issue an official public announcement or publish detailed documentation or performance comparisons.
Despite the lack of fanfare, the LiveCodeBench leaderboard, a benchmark developed by researchers from UC Berkeley, MIT, and Cornell, ranked DeepSeek’s new model just behind OpenAI’s o4 mini and o3 models in code generation, while outperforming xAI’s Grok 3 mini and Alibaba’s Qwen 3.
Bloomberg first reported the update on Wednesday, citing a DeepSeek representative who told a WeChat group that the company had completed a “minor trial upgrade” and invited users to begin testing the model.
Earlier this year, DeepSeek disrupted conventional thinking around U.S. export controls, which many believed were stalling China’s progress in AI. The company released models that rivaled, and in some cases outperformed, U.S. industry leaders, at a fraction of the cost.
The January launch of the original R1 model sent tech shares outside China tumbling and challenged the prevailing notion that scaling top-tier AI requires massive compute and capital.
Since then, Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent have released models claiming to surpass DeepSeek’s. Meanwhile, U.S. companies have responded: Google’s Gemini has rolled out discounted access tiers, and OpenAI has cut prices while introducing the o3 mini, a more compute-efficient model.
DeepSeek is widely expected to release R2, the successor to R1. Reuters reported in March that R2’s launch was initially planned for May. In the meantime, DeepSeek also released an upgrade to its V3 large language model in March.
