The model was developed by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which claims that R1 matches or even surpasses OpenAI’s ChatGPT o1 on multiple key benchmarks but operates at a fraction of the cost.

As Chinese AI company DeepSeek gains traction in the tech world amid ongoing US-China trade tensions, OpenAI suspects that DeepSeek may have utilized ChatGPT data to develop its own cost-effective AI models.

DeepSeek, a Chinese AI research lab, has released an advanced AI model which rivals leading models from OpenAI. The DeepSeek-R1 model can perform complicated mathematical reasoning, code generation, and more with fewer resources than its American competitors.