DeepSeek Won't Sink U.S. AI Titans

Necessity might be the mother of all invention, but sparking the mother of all selloffs seemed like a stretch. That wasn't the case Monday morning, though, as U.S. markets opened to fresh fears about DeepSeek.

- Dan Gallagher

The Chinese artificial-intelligence startup announced a significant breakthrough late last week with AI models that perform nearly on par with advanced U.S.-born technology.

The rub is that DeepSeek claims to have trained one of its latest models for $5.6 million in computing costs—a fraction of what is currently spent on this side of the Pacific on the same activity. OpenAI's GPT-4 model that was launched in late 2023 cost more than $100 million to train, according to Chief Executive Sam Altman. In a podcast last year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the cost to train some models is approaching $1 billion.