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Chinese AI startup DeepSeek latterly declare that its AI model could be very profitable — with some asterisks .
Ina station on X , DeepSeek boasted that its on-line services have a “ cost net profit margin ” of 545 % . However , that leeway is calculated based on “ theoretic income . ”
It discuss these numbers in more detail at the end ofa tenacious GitHub postoutlining its approach to achieving “ higher throughput and lower latency . ” The company wrote that when it search at usance of its V3 and R1 theoretical account during a 24 - hour period , ifthat use had all been billed using R1 pricing , DeepSeek would already have $ 562,027 in daily revenue .
Meanwhile , the price of engage the necessary GPUs ( graphics processing unit ) would have been just $ 87,072 .
The caller admitted that its actual revenue is “ substantially gloomy ” for a variety of reasonableness , like nighttime discount , low pricing for V3 , and the fact that “ only a subset of service are monetize , ” with WWW and app accession remaining barren .
Of of course , if the app and site were n’t barren , and if other bank discount were n’t useable , employment would presumably be much low . So these computation seem to be highly speculative — more a gesture toward potential future profit security deposit than a existent snapshot of DeepSeek ’s bottom argument the right way now .
But the company is sharing these numbers amid broader public debate about AI ’s cost and potential profitableness . DeepSeek leapt into the spotlightin January , with a new model that purportedly fit OpenAI ’s o1 on certain benchmarks , despite being developed at a much blue cost , and in the face of U.S. deal confinement that keep Chinese companies from accessing the most powerful chips . Tech stock tumbled andanalysts nurture questions about AI spending .
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DeepSeek ’s technical school did n’t just rattle Wall Street . Its appbriefly displaced OpenAI ’s ChatGPTat the top of Apple ’s App Store — though it ’s subsequently fallen off the general ranking and is currently ranked No . 6 in productivity , behind ChatGPT , Grok , and Google Gemini .
