DeepSeek, a China-based artificial intelligence company, has announced an upgrade to its AI chatbot, saying it can now offer enhanced overall logic, mathematics and programming with a reduced hallucination rate.
According to DeepSeek, the upgraded model — DeepSeek-R1-0528 — has “significantly improved its depth of reasoning and inference capabilities.” The startup said the model’s overall performance is now “approaching that of leading models, such as O3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro.”
Performance comparison of language models across six benchmarks. Source: DeepSeek
DeepSeek’s debut of its R1 chatbot in January sent shockwaves through the AI industry and further established China as an AI force. The company’s first AI model had a training cost of $6 million and similar performance to leading AI models trained on significantly larger sums of capital.
According to data from Business of Apps, DeepSeek has been downloaded 75 million times since its launch and had 38 million monthly active users (MAU) as of April. In a recent antitrust lawsuit, Google estimated that Gemini reached 350 million active users in March, while OpenAI’s ChatGPT claimed 600 million active users in the same month.
Related: China’s DeepSeek launches new open-source AI after R1 took on OpenAI
Chinese-American AI race heats up
The United States government is planning to restrict the sale of advanced chip design software to China. According to a Bloomberg report, the move seeks to limit China’s ability to advance its domestic semiconductor manufacturing capabilities.
Semiconductors are critical for a wide range of technologies, including AI, where they serve as the hardware backbone for training and running complex models.
New China AI models, such as Tencent’s T1 and Alibaba’s Qwen3, have also emerged in the first few months of 2025, spurring the AI race along.
Magazine: AI Eye: 9 curious things about DeepSeek R1