A group of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, claims they’ve managed to reproduce the core technology behind DeepSeek’s headline-grabbing AI at a total cost of roughly $30. The news is another twist in a quickly developing narrative about whether building state-of-the-art AI demands colossal budgets or if far more affordable alternatives have been overlooked by tech’s biggest players.

Chinese cloud giant Alibaba says that its Qwen2.5-Max artificial intelligence model outperformed its rivals at OpenAI, Meta and DeepSeek.