Impact Score: 5/10
Ollama v0.9.0 — Release Notes & Engineering Impact
Source available — automated, not human-reviewed
Component: ollama · Channel: stable. Automated analysis, not a compatibility certification. How this works.
Analysis updated: 2026-11-01.
⚡ Executive Summary (TL;DR)
Ollama v0.9.0. Source highlight: DeepSeek-R1-2508: DeepSeek-R1 has received a minor version upgrade to DeepSeek-R1-0528 for the 8 billion parameter distilled model and the full 671 billion parameter model. In this update, DeepSeek R1 has significantly improved its reasoning and inference capabilities.
Who Does This Impact? (Role-Based Analysis)
💻 Software Engineers & Devs
Check the source notes against the package and APIs you use before upgrading.
📊 Product & Engineering Leads
Use the documented changes to assess relevance to your product; release frequency alone is not a quality measure.
⚙️ DevOps & Security
Verify the target version, runtime requirements and rollback procedure in the official documentation.
✨ New Features & Capabilities (2)
- more will be added under thinking models.
- Add thinking support to Ollama
⚡ Performance & Enhancements (1)
- DeepSeek-R1-2508: DeepSeek-R1 has received a minor version upgrade to DeepSeek-R1-0528 for the 8 billion parameter distilled model and the full 671 billion parameter model. In this update, DeepSeek R1 has significantly improved its reasoning and inference capabilities.
📄 View Raw Release Notes (Original Developer Log)
## New models
- [DeepSeek-R1-2508](https://ollama.com/library/deepseek-r1): DeepSeek-R1 has received a minor version upgrade to DeepSeek-R1-0528 for the 8 billion parameter distilled model and the full 671 billion parameter model. In this update, DeepSeek R1 has significantly improved its reasoning and inference capabilities.
## Thinking
Ollama now has the ability to enable or disable thinking. This gives users the flexibility to choose the model’s thinking behavior for different applications and use cases.
When thinking is enabled, the output will separate the model’s thinking from the model’s output. When thinking is disabled, the model will not think and directly output the content.
Models that support thinking:
- [DeepSeek R1](https://ollama.com/library/deepseek-r1)
- [Qwen 3](https://ollama.com/library/qwen3)
- more will be added under thinking models.
When running a model that supports thinking, Ollama will now display the model's thoughts:
```
% ollama run deepseek-r1
>>> How many Rs are in strawberry
Thinking...
First, I need to understand what the question is asking. It's asking how many letters 'R' are present in the word "strawberry."
Next, I'll examine each letter in the word individually.
I'll start from the beginning and count every occurrence of the letter 'R.'
After reviewing all the letters, I determine that there are three instances where the letter 'R' appears in the word "strawberry."
...done thinking.
There are three **Rs** in the word **"strawberry"**.
```
In Ollama's API, a model's thinking is now returned as a separate `thinking` field for easy parsing:
```
{
"message": {
"role": "assistant",
"thinking": "First, I need to understand what the question is asking. It's asking how many letters 'R' are present in the word "strawberry...",
"content": "There are **3** instances of the letter **R** in the word **"strawberry."**"
}
}
```
### Turning thinking on and off
In the API, thinking can be enabled by passing `"think": true` and disabled by passing `"think": false`
```
curl http://localhost:11434/api/chat -d '{
"model": "deepseek-r1",
"messages": [
{
"role": "user",
"content": "Why is the sky blue?"
},
],
"think": true
}'
```
In Ollama's CLI, use `/set think` and `/set nothink` to enable and disable thinking.
## What's Changed
* Add thinking support to Ollama
**Full Changelog**: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/compare/v0.8.0...v0.9.0