Demis Hassabis, head of Google’s DeepMind, questioned the reported low development costs of DeepSeek’s AI system, calling them “exaggerated and a little bit misleading.”

DeepSeek claimed to have built its AI model with US$5.6 million in computing costs, but Hassabis argued this likely only cover the final training round, not total development expenses.

The startup garnered attention for achieving high performance using older Nvidia chips at a lower cost than US rivals like OpenAI and Google, but experts have scrutinized these claims.

Hassabis suggested DeepSeek may have used techniques like “distillation,” training AI models based on outputs from existing systems, possibly relying on Western AI.

DeepSeek has not responded to these allegations.