Global AI Powerhouses Clash: China’s AI Revolution Challenges U.S. Tech Dominance
DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen now rival top U.S. models in capability, and DeepSeek costs about $0.55 per million tokens versus roughly $15 for OpenAI. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has more than 910 million downloads, while DeepSeek has about 125 million. HSBC and Standard Chartered began testing DeepSeek, Saudi Aramco deployed it in its main data center, and Amazon, Microsoft, and Google now offer DeepSeek on their cloud platforms. DeepSeek was trained on Nvidia H800 GPUs, which were not blocked by export bans, yet its performance matches models trained on newer hardware. Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen was open-sourced, spawning over 100,000 variant models,