Did it really cost $6m to ‘make’ DeepSeek?published at 17:51 Greenwich Mean Time 28 January
Tom Gerken
Technology reporter
That widely-reported figure is at the heart of what has caused such consternation in the stock market – the idea that this impressive AI toolkit was developed for little compared to its big budget US-based rivals.
The true figure is much harder to say for sure.
Firstly, it all comes from the first table in DeepSeek’s publicly available report , externalon how the tool works. It estimates the total cost of training DeepSeek V3 at just under $5.6m (£4.5m).
Some people have challenged this figure, but if we take it at face value, that would still only cover the cost of training this version of its AI – DeepSeek-V3 came as a result of various previous iterations.
Its researchers state in the report that the $5.6m figure excludes the costs of its previous research in the space (which has been…
