DeepSeek's $6 million R1 cost-efficient model training might be a ruse — the Chinese startup reportedly spent $1.6 billion and bought 50,000 NVIDIA GPUs while its top researchers earned $1.3 million

DeepSeek logo is seen on a mobile screen.

DeepSeek continues to stir more controversy over its ultra-cost-effective AI model, surpassing proprietary models like OpenAI's o1 reasoning model across a range of benchmarks, including coding, science, and math, at a fraction of the development cost.

More specifically, DeepSeek's R1 V3-powered model was reportedly trained using $6 million, and the reinforcement learning technique amid claims AI progression has hit a wall due to a lack of high-quality knowledge for training. However, a new report by SemiAnalysis reveals more intricate details of DeepSeek's AI model (via Tom's Hardware).