
China's DeepSeek ups AI stakes as R2 rumours fly fast
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Amid tariff turfs, China is rumoured to advance its supremacy in artificial intelligence (AI) model race by releasing DeepSeek R2 , the second version of reasoning model which shook US stock markets in February.According to some reports in the Chinese media, DeepSeek R2, expected to be released this week, will be 97.3% cheaper than OpenAI's GPT-4o model and 100% trained on Huawei's Ascend 910B GPU cluster, establishing China's independence from American AI chips. Here's a look at what it will mean for the AI ecosystemIf the model performs on a par with competitors on global benchmarks, DeepSeek could establish Huawei as the first serious competitor to NVIDIA, market watchers wrote on X. The previous model released by the Hangzhou, China-based AI startup had wiped off $1.5 trillion off US stock markets, tumbling stocks of tech giants like NVIDIA, Alphabet and Microsoft.Meanwhile, Meta, which has been an open-source category leader until now is also expected to lose market share with DeepSeek also offering its models free-to-access. This comes at a time when OpenAI is also looking to release its first open-source model soon.In terms of size, DeepSeek R2 will be comparable to OpenAI's largest model so far GPT 4.5 code-named Orion with 1.8 trillion parameters. Meanwhile, DeepSeek R2 is expected to have 1.2 trillion parameters trained on 5.2 petabytes of training data.The pricing for consuming the model through APIs is expected to be $0.7 per million input tokens and $0.27 per million output tokens, which is 97.3% cheaper than OpenAI.

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- Time of India
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