DeepSeek’s up to date R1 reasoning AI mannequin is perhaps getting the majority of the AI group’s consideration this week. But the Chinese AI lab additionally launched a smaller, “distilled” model of its new R1, DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B, that DeepSeek claims beats comparably sized fashions on sure benchmarks.
The smaller up to date R1, which was constructed utilizing the Qwen3-8B mannequin Alibaba launched in May as a basis, performs higher than Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash on AIME 2025, a set of difficult math questions.
DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B additionally almost matches Microsoft’s just lately launched Phi 4 reasoning plus mannequin on one other math abilities check, HMMT.
So-called distilled fashions like DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B are typically much less succesful than their full-sized counterparts. On the plus facet, they’re far much less computationally demanding. According to the cloud platform NodeShift, Qwen3-8B requires a GPU with 40GB-80GB of RAM to run (e.g., an Nvidia H100). The full-sized new R1 wants round a dozen 80GB GPUs.
DeepSeek skilled DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B by taking textual content generated by the up to date R1 and utilizing it to fine-tune Qwen3-8B. In a devoted internet web page for the mannequin on the AI dev platform Hugging Face, DeepSeek describes DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B as “for each educational analysis on reasoning fashions and industrial growth targeted on small-scale fashions.”
DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B is offered beneath a permissive MIT license, that means it may be used commercially with out restriction. Several hosts, together with LM Studio, already supply the mannequin by means of an API.
