DeepSeek, a 20-month-old start-up that was founded in Alibaba’s home city, Hangzhou, became a global sensation this week and figures prominently as the first benchmark that Alibaba appears to now measure itself against. Alibaba Cloud also shared scores that suggest its AI beats OpenAI and Anthropic’s models in certain benchmarks.
Cloud service providers like Alibaba and Tencent have slashed their pricing in recent months in the effort to win over more users. DeepSeek has already contributed to that price war, alongside a half dozen other promising AI startups in China that have secured funding at unicorn valuations.
