Chinese Products Could Level the Playing Field for AI Solutions

Developers in China are creating solutions that cost less money and require less sophisticated hardware.

One of the challenges of AI adoption is money: Building large language models is expensive. That assumption is being challenged by the efforts of Chinese developers who are creating approaches that cost far less money and require less sophisticated hardware.

The notion of cheaper AI was enough to rattle the stock market Monday as investors digested the possibility that models built by the likes of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic may be undercut by new products coming out of China.

According to media reports, the Chinese AI company DeepSeek unveiled DeepSeek-R1, an open-source reasoning model that, it claims, compares well to OpenAI’s 01 in performance tests. Last month, DeepSeek launched an open source large language model that it said took only two month and $6 million to create. The model is also open-source, which is bound to attract developers and other technology specialists.