DeepSeek V3.2 is the #2 most intelligent open weights model and also ranks ahead of Grok 4 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 (Thinking)

Since the original DeepSeek V3 release ~11 moths ago in late December 2024, DeepSeek’s V3 architecture with 671B total/37B active parameters has seen them go from a model scoring a 32 to scoring a 66 in Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.

DeepSeek AI has also released V3.2-Speciale, a reasoning-only variant with enhanced capabilities but significantly higher token usage. This is a common tradeoff in reasoning models, where more enhanced reasoning generally yields higher intelligence scores and more output tokens. V3.2-Speciale is available via DeepSeek's first-party API until December 15.

V3.2-Speciale currently scores lower on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (59) than V3.2 (66) because DeepSeek's API does not yet support tool calling for this model. If V3.2-Speciale matched V3.2's tau2 score (91%) with tool calling enabled, it would score ~68 on the Intelligence Index, making it the most intelligent open-weights model. V3.2-Speciale uses 160M output tokens to complete the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, nearly ~2x the number of tokens used by V3.2 in reasoning mode.

DeepSeek V3.2 uses an identical architecture to V3.2-Exp, which introduced DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) to reduce the compute required for long context inference. Our Long Context Reasoning benchmark showed no cost to intelligence of the introduction of DSA. DeepSeek reflected this cost advantage of V3.2-Exp by cutting pricing on their first party API from $0.56/$1.68 to $0.28/$0.42 per 1M input/output tokens - a 50% and 75% reduction in pricing of input and output tokens respectively.

Key benchmarking takeaways:

• 🧠  DeepSeek V3.2: In reasoning mode, DeepSeek V3.2 scores 66 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index and places equivalently to Kimi K2 Thinking (67) and ahead of Grok 4 (65), Grok 4.1 Fast (Reasoning, 64) and Claude Sonnet 4.5 (Thinking, 63). It demonstrates notable uplifts compared to V3.2-Exp (57) across tool use, long context reasoning and coding.
• 🧠  DeepSeek V3.2-Speciale: V3.2-Speciale scores higher than V3.2 (Reasoning) across 7 of the 10 benchmarks in our Intelligence Index. V3.2-Speciale now holds the highest and second highest scores amongst all models for AIME25 (97%) and LiveCodeBench (90%) respectively. However, as mentioned above, DeepSeek’s first-party API for V3.2-Speciale does not support tool-calling and the model gets a score of 0 on the tau2 benchmark.
• 📚 Hallucination and Knowledge: DeepSeek V3.2-Speciale and V3.2 are the highest ranked open weights models on the Artificial Analysis Omniscience Index scoring -19 and -23 respectively. Proprietary models from Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI typically lead this index.
• ⚡ Non-reasoning performance: In non-reasoning mode, DeepSeek V3.2 scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (+6 points vs. V3.2-Exp) and is the #3 most intelligent non-reasoning model. DeepSeek V3.2 (Non-reasoning) matches the intelligence of DeepSeek R1 0528, a frontier reasoning model from May 2025, highlighting the rapid intelligence gains achieved through pre-training and RL improvements this year.
• ⚙️ Token efficiency: In reasoning mode, DeepSeek V3.2 used more tokens than V3.2-Exp to run the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (from 62M to 86M). Token usage remains similar in non-reasoning variant. V3.2-Speciale demonstrates significantly higher token usage, using ~160M output tokens ahead of Kimi K2 Thinking (140M) and Grok 4 (120M)
• 💲 Pricing: DeepSeek has not updated per token pricing for their first-party and all three variants are available at $0.28/$0.42 per 1M input/output tokens

Other model details:

• ©️ Licensing: DeepSeek V3.2 is available under the MIT License
• 🌐 Availability: DeepSeek V3.2 is available via DeepSeek API, which has replaced DeepSeek V3.2-Exp. Users can access DeepSeek V3.2-Speciale via a temporary DeepSeek API until December 15. Given the intelligence uplift in this release, we expect a number of third-party providers to serve this model soon.
• 📏 Size: DeepSeek V3.2 Exp has 671B total parameters and 37B active parameters. This is the same as all previous models in the DeepSeek V3 and R1 series

At DeepSeek's first-party API pricing of $0.28/$0.42 per 1M input/output tokens, V3.2 (Reasoning) sits on the Pareto frontier for Intelligence vs. Cost to Run Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index chart

DeepSeek V3.2-Speciale is the highest ranked open weights model on the Artificial Analysis Omniscience Index while V3.2 (Reasoning) matches Kimi K2 Thinking

DeepSeek V3.2 is more verbose than its predecessor in reasoning mode, using more output tokens to run the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (86M vs. 62M).