DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial intelligence model that stunned Silicon Valley and Wall Street, may have cost about $1 billion to develop rather than the $US5.6 million ($9 million) price tag it has popularised, says a leading Australian technology investor.

DeepSeek has had such a profound impact since it launched its reasoning model R1 because it claims the bot was produced on a $US5.6 million training budget. OpenAI’s ChatGPT cost at least 100 times that.