China Can Still Win the AI Race With Inferior Technology

China Can Still Win the AI Race With Inferior Technology Welcome to Bloomberg’s AI Today newsletter. Every weekday we’ll break down artificial intelligence’s threats and opportunities for businesses, workers, finance and economies. Sign up now if you’re not already on the list. Chinese frontier lab DeepSeek is emblematic of the country’s ambitions in frontier AI — which is to build the tech on a shoestring and gain share by pushing it out for pennies. It’s a story about economics and power as well as engineering. A standardized intelligence task on DeepSeek’s V4 Flash model costs about two cents. The same task on Anthropic’s premium model runs over two dollars, according to benchmarking site Artificial Analysis which compared them on different kinds of standardized tasks. The difference racks up fast for companies using these models at scale, and it’s increasingly hard to defend using pricier models. San Francisco’s Lindy AI said it slashed its AI spend by 90% after switching.