Y'all better saddle up, 'cause DeepSeek’s newly honed R1 reasoning AI model is ropin’ in all the buzz out there in the AI prairie this week. But let me tell ya, that Chinese AI corral ain't just sitting on one pony. They’ve let loose a leaner, “distilled” version of this here R1 they call DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B. Word around the campfire is it’s capable of showin’ up similar-sized broncos in certain benchmarks.

A Smarter 'Lil Buckaroo

This tinier version of R1 rides the Qwen3-8B, which Alibaba galloped out back in May. And would ya believe, it’s showin’ up Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash on AIME 2025—a pack of tough math puzzles no less!

Matchin' Skills in the Math Arena

DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B almost goes nose to nose with Microsoft's latest Phi 4 reasoning plus model in the HMMT math showdown.

Why Go for Distilled?

Them distilled models like this here DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B might not pack the same punch as their full-grown kin. But boy, they sure ain't as power-hungry. Speak to NodeShift, and they'll tell ya Qwen3-8B runs fine on a GPU with 40GB-80GB of RAM (like an Nvidia H100). Meanwhile, that full-sized new R1 is a mighty hungry beast takin' a dozen 80GB GPUs to run.

How They Trained This Steed

To train DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B, DeepSeek hitched the text generated by the fresh R1 to fine-tune Qwen3-8B. Over on the AI dev spread called Hugging Face, DeepSeek lays it out clear—DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B ain't just for academic wranglin’ of reasoning models but also for industrial work focusing on pint-sized models.

Ride with Freedom

DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B rides under a permissive MIT license, so it's free to gallop commercially without a bit in its mouth. A few of them ranches, like LM Studio, already offer this stallion through an API. Ride on, partner!