Tech war: Chinese AI models led by DeepSeek catch up with US rivals at lower prices
China's home-grown
artificial intelligence (AI) models are rapidly closing their performance gap with leading US rivals while offering significantly lower prices, according to benchmarking and consultancy firm Artificial Analysis.
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DeepSeek-R1, a reasoning model developed by
China's most prominent AI start-up , scored 60 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, making it the third most intelligent AI model in the world, behind ChatGPT maker OpenAI's o1 and o3-mini, which scored 62 and 66, respectively. The index evaluated model performance across a variety of intelligence and reasoning data sets.
In terms of pricing for developers, DeepSeek-R1 ranked eighth globally, while OpenAI's GPT-4.5 and o1 were listed as the two most expensive models.
The rankings reflect how Chinese AI models are quickly catching up to their Western counterparts in model performance, while actively lowering prices amid an intense domestic price war.
05:00
Does the arrival of China's low-cost DeepSeek mean the end of Nvidia's chip dominance?
Does the arrival of China's low-cost DeepSeek mean the end of Nvidia's chip dominance?
'One year ago, the AI frontier was overwhelmingly dominated by US companies,' Artificial Analysis said in a post on X last month. 'Today, nearly a dozen Chinese companies have models matching or exceeding current-generation models from most US labs.'
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