Thought so too. I don't know how it could be different though. They are competing against behemoths like OpenAI or Google, but have only 200 people. Even Anthropic has over 1000 people. DeepSeek has less than 200 people so the comparison seems fair.
On the other hand I'm aware of no credible accusations of deepseek fudging benchmarks whereas OpenAI has had multiple instances of independent parties not being able to replicate their claimed performances on benchmarks (and not being honest and transparent about their benchmarking).