Headlines seized upon DeepSeek’s modest $6 million training cost, casting doubt on mega-projects like OpenAI’s $500 billion development venture known as Project Stargate. Frantic investors dumped shares of Nvidia and American tech stocks, driving a brief but astounding $1 trillion market drop. Meta and OpenAI would later capitalize on the panic, urging the White House to block state-level AI regulations and approve training on copyrighted material.<\/p>\n
Wenfeng, who hails from a village in southern China, had already proven a knack for boldly undercutting his rivals: months before DeepSeek\u2019s global ascent, his firm had sparked a domestic price war by releasing a language model so aggressively priced it forced Chinese tech giants like Baidu and Alibaba to slash rates by more than 95%.<\/p>\n
But while R1 was impressive\u2014especially for a company that spun out of Wenfeng\u2019s trading firm a short two years earlier\u2014the narrative surrounding it relied on selective information. The $6 million figure, for instance, ignored the roughly $1.6 billion DeepSeek spent to assemble its cluster of computing chips, according to research firm SemiAnalysis<\/a>\u2014not to mention the seven-figure salaries the company reportedly pays its top researchers. More tellingly, the frenzy conveniently overlooked that a Google DeepMind model released one month earlier offered similar performance for an even lower price\u2014part of a wider trend that has seen the cost of AI fall precipitously. Nonetheless, Wenfeng\u2019s formidable self-mythologizing\u2014and ability to bring competitors\u2019 backs against the wall\u2014has proven to be a powerful market-mover.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Headlines seized upon DeepSeek’s modest $6 million training cost, casting doubt on mega-projects like OpenAI’s $500 billion development…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":117808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[76121,191,25351,2849,1766,76122,76123,74,76120],"class_list":{"0":"post-117807","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-computing","8":"tag-accolades","9":"tag-computing","10":"tag-franchise","11":"tag-list","12":"tag-magazine","13":"tag-special-project","14":"tag-sponsorshipblock","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-time100-ai-2025"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}