After having been expected to launch in May, DeepSeek R2 still isn’t here.
DeepSeek R1 went viral in early 2025, and there was an expectation that R2 would bring major improvements and even lower costs. DeepSeek R1 stunned the world and tanked the US stock market because its performance was similar to ChatGPT o1, but it was far cheaper to train and run. DeepSeek didn’t have access to the same hardware as US AI firms, like the newest Nvidia chips. Instead, it used whatever AI chips it could buy, legally or through the black market, and relied on software optimizations to train a reasoning model as powerful as what ChatGPT could offer.
At the time, I pointed out that high-end hardware would still be needed to train frontier AI models, even if other AI firms adopted DeepSeek’s software optimizations. These companies would also need to invest heavily in data centers to ensure their services could serve millions of users without issues.
It turns out access to advanced hardware is one reason DeepSeek isn’t able to ship the R2 reasoning model.
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What happened to DeepSeek’s revolutionary R2 AI? originally appeared on BGR.com on Fri, 27 Jun 2025 at 10:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.