Tech war: Chinese AI models led by DeepSeek catch up with US rivals at lower prices

DeepSeek’s model ranks third in performance while offering much cheaper pricing than OpenAI’s top models, according to a benchmarking firm

China’s home-grown artificial intelligence (AI) models are rapidly closing their performance gap with leading US rivals while offering significantly lower prices, according to benchmarking and consultancy firm Artificial Analysis.

DeepSeek-R1, a reasoning model developed by China’s most prominent AI start-up, scored 60 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, making it the third most intelligent AI model in the world, behind ChatGPT maker OpenAI’s o1 and o3-mini, which scored 62 and 66, respectively. The index evaluated model performance across a variety of intelligence and reasoning data sets.

In terms of pricing for developers, DeepSeek-R1 ranked eighth globally, while OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 and o1 were listed as the two most expensive models.