>Isn't it just as likely Chinese sponsors of this have incentivized and sponsored an undercutting of prices so that a more favorable LLM is preferred on the market?
Since the model is open weights, it's easy to estimate the cost of serving it. If the cost was significantly higher than DeepSeek charges on their API, we'd expect other LLM hosting providers to charge significantly more for DeepSeek (since they aren't subsidised, so need to cover their costs), but that isn't the case.
This isn't possible with OpenAI because we don't know the size or architecture of their models.
Regarding censorship, most of it is done at the API level, not the model level, so running locally (or with another hosting provider) is much less expensive.
Since the model is open weights, it's easy to estimate the cost of serving it. If the cost was significantly higher than DeepSeek charges on their API, we'd expect other LLM hosting providers to charge significantly more for DeepSeek (since they aren't subsidised, so need to cover their costs), but that isn't the case.
This isn't possible with OpenAI because we don't know the size or architecture of their models.
Regarding censorship, most of it is done at the API level, not the model level, so running locally (or with another hosting provider) is much less expensive.