Australian developers trialling DeepSeek say it’s 5 times cheaper
Testers say the Chinese AI platform is on par with OpenAI and Anthropic and offers an “amazing level of performance”, but is far cheaper to run.
Henry Badgery and Matt Boustred have tried out DeepSeek. Not only was the performance on par with the results produced by models developed by OpenAI and Anthropic, it was five times cheaper to run. Peter Rae
Matt Boustred and Henry Badgery spent the first weekend of February holed up in their office trying to find out if the hottest thing in AI lived up to the hype.
The co-founders of AI consultant Fourday had dabbled with Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek’s technology since December, but now its reasoning model, R1, was available on Fireworks.ai – a US platform that allows companies to access hundreds of AI models – they wanted to see how clever the low-cost model really was.
Tess BennettTechnology reporterTess Bennett is a technology reporter with The Australian Financial Review, based in the Brisbane newsroom. She was previously the work & careers reporter. Connect with Tess on Twitter. Email Tess at tess.bennett@afr.com
