What is the Deepseek R1 0528 Qwen 3?
This is a distilled version of Deepseek's flagship R1 reasoning model, fine-tuned on Qwen3's 8B base. When I say “distilled,” I mean they took all the smart reasoning patterns—like how the big model thinks through tough math and code problems—and taught them to a much smaller model. The result is something that punches way above its weight class: state-of-the-art open-source reasoning performance for an 8B-parameter model. No, it's not better than the biggest models, but it's shockingly close—and much faster, cheaper, and easier to use.
Why should you care?
I tried to build a startup a couple of years ago on some “mid-tier” open models, and man, the gap between them and GPT-4 was brutal. Here's the thing—Deepseek R1 0528 Qwen 3 genuinely closes that gap on reasoning tasks, especially math and coding. Benchmarks like AIME 2024 and LiveCodeBench show it outperforms the original Qwen3 8B by up to 10%, and even keeps up with models 30 times its size.
Where does it stumble?
It's not always the fastest output—so don't expect turbo speed like a raw 7B LLaMA. Pricing is free since you're using someone else's API, but if you run it yourself, you'll need a decent local setup. Also, it's text-only—no images yet. I am not putting any limits, or requiring sign up or log in. I am also not logging chats. Your IP address is made completely anonymous through the openrouter API I use for this bot. If you apperciate my effort and want to keep the free AI bots and tools coming, consider buying me a coffee. I drink the cheap stuff.