The news: DeepSeek released its latest open-source model, R1-0528, and the update delivers near-parity reasoning with OpenAI’s o3 and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, per VentureBeat.
Existing DeepSeek API users are now upgraded to R1-0528 at no extra cost. Pricing stands at $0.14 per million input tokens (or $0.035 during discount hours) and $2.19 per million output tokens. In context, 1 million tokens is about 750,000 words.
DeepSeek’s latest performance upgrades raise speculation that its R2 frontier model could be released in the coming months.
Continued innovation: The Chinese startup shook the AI landscape in January when its R1 chatbot performed as well as OpenAI’s GPT-4o while being trained at 3% to 5% of the total cost of competitors' models.
R1-0528 achieved 87.5% on the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME)—up from the previous model’s 70%. It scored 73.3% on LiveCodeBench (versus 63.5% previously), and more than doubled its previous score on “Humanity’s Last Exam,” with fewer hallucinations.
Initial developer reactions have been mostly positive, with some noting that it excels at coding and is nearly on par with closed models that have rate limits or paywalls.
Competitors take note: DeepSeek is increasingly focused on reasoning, which benefits AI agents by allowing them to complete increasingly complex tasks, make informed decisions, and solve problems more effectively.
The availability of accessible and affordable open-source AI helps democratize the tech, giving startups, researchers, and enterprises the tools to build smarter systems without vendor lock-in or high costs.
Our take: By matching premium models in reasoning tasks at a fraction of the cost, open models like R1-0528 and Meta’s Llama continue to alter the economics of generative AI (genAI).
Developers and businesses should explore how DeepSeek R1-0528’s features compare with competitors now while its pricing remains low and rate limits are flexible.
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