China’s DeepSeek unveils new AI model: Here is everything we know about it

The Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek has launched its latest experimental model, which claims to handle a large amount of data and costs less than its previous models.

The company sparked a frenzy in January when it came onto the scene with R1, an AI model and chatbot that the company claimed was cheaper and performed just as well as OpenAI's rival ChatGPT model. 

However, some countries banned government agencies from using DeepSeek, including Italy, the United States, and South Korea, citing national security concerns. 

On Monday, the company unveiled DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp, which is an experimental version of its current model, DeepSeek-V3.1-Terminus. It aims to make AI systems more “efficient,” according to a company post on the AI forum Hugging Face.

It has been open sourced on developer platforms Hugging Face. 

DeepSeek said it cuts the cost of running the AI in half compared to the earlier version.

“The big improvement is a new feature called DSA (DeepSeek Sparse Attention), which makes the AI better at handling long documents and conversations,” Adina Yakefu, Chinese community lead at Hugging Face, told CNBC.

Sparse Attention is the technology that enhances model efficiency by reducing the computational costs that are needed to examine a text. 

“This experimental release represents our ongoing research into more efficient transformer architectures,” the post on Hugging Face said.

DeepSeek’s V3.1-Terminus does not rank as strongly on metrics such as intelligence as ChatGPT-5 or other leading AI models such as Grok and Anthropic’s Claude – but it is tied with OpenAI’s open source model gpt-oss-120b, according to AI benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis.

However, the technology industry is paying attention to DeepSeek after the company said it would tailor its models for AI chips that are developed in China. 

China is pressuring its tech companies to break their reliance on foreign chip makers so it can compete in the AI race.

US company Nvidia has faced increased restrictions on its chip exports to China under both former US president Joe Biden and current President Donald Trump.

The US banned Nvidia from selling its most powerful chips, the Blackwell chip, to China in April, arguing it was necessary to safeguard US national and economic security as the AI global race gained pace. But it was allowed to sell less advanced chips. 

The Financial Times reported earlier in September that China’s internet regulator had banned local companies from buying Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000 chips, as Beijing tries to reduce dependence on foreign semiconductors.