Meanwhile, Paul Triolio, senior VP for China and technology policy lead at advisory firm DGA Group, noted it was difficult to draw a direct comparison between DeepSeek's model cost and that of major U.S. developers.
"The 5.6 million figure for DeepSeek V3 was just for one training run, and the company stressed that this did not represent the overall cost of R&D to develop the model," he said. "The overall cost then was likely significantly higher, but still lower than the amount spent by major US AI companies."