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DeepSeek Releases New Reasoning Models to Take On ChatGPT and Gemini

China's DeepSeek is set on beating American AI firms.

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Headshot of Imad Khan
Imad Khan Senior Reporter
Imad is a senior reporter covering Google and internet culture. Hailing from Texas, Imad started his journalism career in 2013 and has amassed bylines with The New York Times, The Washington Post, ESPN, Tom's Guide and Wired, among others.
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Imad Khan
2 min read
DeepSeek AI

China's DeepSeek has released two new AI reasoning models.

 James Martin/CNET

DeepSeek, the China-based AI company, has released two new reasoning-capable AI models, V3.2 and V3.2-Speciale, with the latter outperforming Gemini 3.0 Pro and GPT-5 High in benchmarks, the company said in news release on Monday. At the moment, V3.2 is available on the app and web, whereas V3.2-Speciale can only be accessed via the API. 

DeepSeek V3.2 is a follow-up to V3.2-Exp, which stands for experimental and was released in September. The Hangzhou-based AI company says V3.2 surpasses the performance of OpenAI's GPT-5 in reasoning benchmarks and has reasoning performance "on par" with Gemini 3.0 Pro. DeepSeek didn't release testing against GPT-5 Pro. That could be because ChatGPT is blocked in China. What's more, DeepSeek said it's committed to staying open source, meaning any company can load DeepSeek's models for free. But considering V3.2 has 685 billion parameters, it can only run on a giant server stack with millions of dollars in hardware.

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DeepSeek didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

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DeepSeek's release of 3.2 comes as the company continues to put American AI companies on notice. The company first gained worldwide attention earlier this year when it released a reasoning-capable model online, for free. 

It immediately turned the narrative about reasoning models on its head, showing that it's possible to run smarter, more capable AI models at a fraction of the cost. This spooked Wall Street, with some wondering if OpenAI, Google and Anthropic weren't innovating fast enough. 

Since then, ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude have all released reasoning-level models for free, with higher-level "thinking" models being available for paid subscribers. 

DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale won gold in the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) and International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), the company said. 

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)