DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, has made waves in the tech world, especially with the launch of its DeepSeek-V3 and R1 models.

V2 was open-source and unprecedentedly cheap, only 1 yuan ($0.14) per 1 million tokens - led to Alibaba's cloud unit announcing price cuts of up to 97% on a range of models

Alibaba claims that its Qwen2.5-Max artificial intelligence model outperformed its rivals at OpenAI, Meta and DeepSeek.