The DeepSeek chatbot was reportedly developed for a fraction of the cost of its rivals, raising questions about the future of America’s AI dominance and the scale of investments US firms are planning.
Last week, OpenAI joined a group of other firms who pledged to invest $500bn (£400bn) in building AI infrastructure in the US.
President Donald Trump, in one of his first announcements since returning to office, called it “the largest AI infrastructure project by far in history” that would help keep “the future of technology” in the US.
DeepSeek is powered by the open source DeepSeek-V3 model, which its researchers claim was trained for around $6m – significantly less than the billions spent by rivals.
But this claim has been disputed by others in AI.
The researchers say they use already existing technology, as well as open source code – software that can be used, modified or distributed by anybody free of charge.
DeepSeek’s emergence…
