SHANGHAI, May 29 - Chinese artificial intelligence

startup DeepSeek released an update to its R1 reasoning model in

the early hours of Thursday, stepping up competition with U.S.

rivals such as OpenAI.

DeepSeek launched R1-0528 on developer platform Hugging

Face, but has yet to make an official public announcement. It

did not publish a description of the model or comparisons.

But the LiveCodeBench leaderboard, a benchmark developed by

researchers from UC Berkeley, MIT, and Cornell, ranked

DeepSeek's updated R1 reasoning model just slightly behind

OpenAI's o4 mini and o3 reasoning models on code generation and

ahead of xAI's Grok 3 mini and Alibaba's ( BABA ) Qwen 3.

Bloomberg earlier reported the update on Wedneday. It said

that a DeepSeek representative had told a WeChat group that it

had completed what it described as a "minor trial upgrade" and

that users could start testing it.

DeepSeek earlier this year upended beliefs that U.S. export

controls were holding back China's AI advancements after the

startup released AI models that were on a par or better than

industry-leading models in the United States at a fraction of

the cost.

The launch of R1 in January sent tech shares outside China

plummetting in January and challenged the view that scaling AI

requires vast computing power and investment. Since R1's

release, Chinese tech giants like Alibaba ( BABA ) and Tencent ( TCTZF )

have released models claiming to surpass DeepSeek's.

Google's Gemini has introduced discounted tiers of

access while OpenAI cut prices and released an o3 Mini model

that relies on less computing power.

The company is still widely expected to release R2, a

successor to R1. Reuters reported in March, citing sources, that

R2's release was initially planned for May. DeepSeek also

released an upgrade to its V3 large language model in March.