DeepSeek Slows As Chinese Rivals Surge

DeepSeek doesn’t look dead; it looks like a team that burned its biggest hype burst early and is now paying the price for a quieter cadence.

• –Official docs show V3.2 and V3.2-Speciale released in late 2025, so the “stuck on V3.2” framing is already out of date.
• –The bigger issue is perception: competitors have turned every model drop into a marketing event, while DeepSeek’s updates feel more technical than visible.
• –DeepSeek still has multimodal work in the stack, but Janus/VL hasn’t become the flagship story the way R1 and V3 did.
• –If they want to stay in the front-row conversation, they need one unmistakable leap, not another incremental reasoning update.