DeepSeek R1 just got even smarter with a new upgrade — here's what's changed
Significant improvement in reasoning and coding abilities
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DeepSeek, one of the newer competitors in the AI space, has been making waves recently. Since launching its R1 model in January 2025, it has shot through the charts to become one of the most popular chatbots on the market.
However, in a rapidly changing space, there is no slowing down. Deepseek has just launched its latest model, DEEPSEEK-V3-0324, made available via the AI development platform Hugging Face (this does require some coding knowledge to try out for now).
There aren’t any new tricks or fancy toys, instead, this latest version focuses on core changes. Mainly, this included significant improvements in both reasoning and coding abilities.
This means a more robust understanding of complex tasks and an improved ability to solve them. Equally, for web designers, the latest version of DeepSeek can produce more concise code, resulting in better web pages and game interfaces.
The most important change, however, is in the model’s ability to run efficiently.
For a lot of the big AI names you know, a supercomputer is used to run and train the model. These are immensely powerful systems, capable of handling huge amounts of data. However these are, unsurprisingly, incredibly expensive to run.
With this latest version, DeepSeek plans to combat this by producing a model that's easier on the operational costs. This has been a big part of DeepSeek’s mission; trying to make more cost-effective AI solutions without sacrificing performance.
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Competition from Google
This update comes at the same time as Google Gemini’s 2.5 Pro update. This brought along similar upgrades to the Gemini AI model. Interlinked in the Google Workspace suite and available via the Gemini chatbot, Google has been leveraging its tools to give its models a wide audience.
Unfortunately for DeepSeek, this latest version of Gemini makes improvements in all of the same areas as DEEPSEEK-V3-0324. This includes better coding abilities, improved reasoning, and better use of tokens, along with a wealth of other new features.
While DeepSeek's newest version is only available to use by those with some coding knowledge, Gemini 2.5 Pro is much easier to try out.
While DeepSeek's newest version is only available to use by those with some coding knowledge, Gemini 2.5 Pro is much easier to try out.
If you are a Gemini Advanced user, you can try out the latest update in the Google Gemini app. Simply sign in and click on the button that says "Gemini" in the top left.
Here you can switch to the 2.5 Pro version. This is experimental for now so is more likely to make mistakes or come back with errors.
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Alex is the AI editor at TomsGuide. Dialed into all things artificial intelligence in the world right now, he knows the best chatbots, the weirdest AI image generators, and the ins and outs of one of tech’s biggest topics.
Before joining the Tom’s Guide team, Alex worked for the brands TechRadar and BBC Science Focus.
He was highly commended in the Specialist Writer category at the BSME's 2023 and was part of a team to win best podcast at the BSME's 2025.
In his time as a journalist, he has covered the latest in AI and robotics, broadband deals, the potential for alien life, the science of being slapped, and just about everything in between.
When he’s not trying to wrap his head around the latest AI whitepaper, Alex pretends to be a capable runner, cook, and climber.
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