DeepSeek could hit $45B valuation from its first investment round

# DeepSeek's Surprising Efficiency Challenge to AI Giants A Chinese AI company called DeepSeek just raised funding that values it at $45 billion, which is remarkable because their AI system works almost as well as OpenAI's while using far less computing power and costing a fraction of the price to build. This matters because it suggests that the expensive, resource-intensive approach to AI development that American companies have been betting on might not be the only way forward. If true, it could shake up the AI industry's competitive landscape and potentially lower barriers to entry for other companies trying to build powerful AI systems.
The Chinese AI lab came to prominence in early 2025 after launching a large language model that trained on a fraction of the compute power and at a fraction of the cost of the big U.S. models like those from OpenAI and Anthropic.
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