DeepSeek has launched its new AI model "DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview" on chat.deepseek.com. The language model specializes in mathematical thinking and logical reasoning. According to DeepSeek, the model shows strong performance on AIME and MATH benchmarks, which test mathematical abilities, matching the level of OpenAI's o1-preview. This performance is by design: Like OpenAI's model, DeepSeek-R1 is a "reasoning model," meaning the quality of its answers improves with longer thinking processes. One key difference is transparency - users can watch the system's thinking process in real time, while OpenAI only shows a summary. The company has previously released high-performing open-source models and plans to make both an API and R1 available as open source. DeepSeek hasn't announced a specific date for the open-source release.