The Chinese AI startup Deepseek recently said that its AI models could be very profitable – with certain asterisks.
In A post on xDeepseek boasted that its online services have a “cost margin” of 545%. However, this margin is calculated on the basis of “theoretical income”.
He discussed these figures in more detail at the end of A longer github message Describing his approach to reach “a higher flow and weaker latency”. The company wrote that when it examines the use of its V3 and R1 models for a period of 24 hours, if This use had all been billed using the R1 price, Deepseek would already have $ 562,027 in daily income.
Meanwhile, the requested GPU rental cost (graphic processing units) would have only been $ 87,072.
The company admitted that its real income was “significantly lower” for various reasons, such as night discounts, the lower prices for the V3, and the fact that “only a subset of services is monetized”, with the web and the accessing applications remaining for free.
Of course, if the application and the website were not free, and if other discounts were not available, the use would probably be much lower. These calculations therefore seem very speculative – more a gesture towards the potential future beneficiary margins than a real snapshot of the net result of Deepseek at the moment.
But the company shares these figures in the midst of broader debates on the cost of AI and potential profitability. Deepseek jumped under the spotlight In January, with a new model which supposedly corresponding to the O1 of Openai on certain references, although it has been developed at a much lower cost, and in the face of American commercial restrictions which prevent Chinese companies from accessing the most powerful tokens. Technological stocks have released and Analysts raised questions about IA spending.
Deepseek technology has not only done Wall Street. Its application Openai chatgpt briefly moved At the top of the Apple App Store – although he later fell from the general classification and is currently classified n ° 6 in productivity, behind Chatgpt, Grok and Google Gemini.
