After taking the world by storm with the debut of its R1 reasoning model in January, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is reportedly looking to maintain the momentum by rushing its new R2 model to market as quickly as possible, Reuters reports.
DeepSeek at first planned to launch R2 in early May, but sources familiar with the company tell Reuters that DeepSeek wants to speed up the schedule. However, the sources didn’t provide a new release date for DeepSeek-R2, which has yet to be announced.
We don’t know much about DeepSeek’s next AI model yet, but the Chinese company wants R2 to have improved coding skills and reason in languages other than English.
When DeepSeek-R1 launched, the entire industry was taken aback by the research paper that claimed the highly sophisticated model was trained at a fraction of the cost of OpenAI’s o1. The pushback was immediate, though, as OpenAI posited that DeepSeek distilled ChatGPT to train its model, and Google called DeepSeek’s claims “exaggerated.”
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Nevertheless, many companies were quick to adopt the new model, including OpenAI investor Microsoft, which added DeepSeek-R1 to Azure AI Foundry and GitHub. You can also find R1 in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) model catalog.
With the arrival of GPT-4.5 still weeks away and GPT-5 potentially months out, DeepSeek has a chance to shake up the market once again if R2 launches soon.
