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.
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