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ZDNET's key takeaways
DeepSeek drops how much its R1 model cost to build.
R1's capabilities make investors question exorbitant AI spending.
Nvidia declined to say if it ever plans to use Intel's factories.
DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab that shook up the market with its impressive open-source R1 model in January, has finally revealed the secret so many were wondering about: how it trained R1 more cheaply than the companies behind other, primarily American, frontier models.
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The company wrote in a paper published Wednesday that building R1 only cost them $249,000 -- a ridiculously low amount in the high-spending world of AI. For context, DeepSeek said in an earlier research paper that its V3 model, which is similar to a standard chatbot model family like Claude, cost $5.6 million to train.
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