Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek quietly released a new version of its R1 reasoning model on Wednesday, marking its first revision since its high-profile debut in January.
The Hangzhou-based company said it had “completed a minor update to the R1 model”, which is now available on the website for its namesake chatbot, as well as its mobile apps, according to a notice posted in a company-run WeChat group chat.
DeepSeek did not disclose details of the changes in the update, dubbed R1-0528, which is now live on the open-source AI platform Hugging Face.
DeepSeek did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The company last updated its foundational large language model V3 in March, touting improvements in coding and writing in the V3-0324 release on Hugging Face.
Although specifics of the R1-0528 upgrade are not public, it quickly captured the attention of the developer community. Independent benchmark platform LiveCodeBench reported that the new model has improved in AI-assisted coding. It now ranks as the top Chinese model for coding capabilities on the LiveCodeBench leaderboard, trailing only OpenAI’s o4-mini-high, o3-high and o4-mini-medium. It outperformed Alibaba Group Holding’s latest Qwen3 and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7, widely regarded as a leading model for AI coding.
