China's DeepSeek ups AI stakes as R2 rumours fly fast
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.
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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 ecosystem
What will be the impact?
If 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.
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How big is the model?
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.
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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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