DeepSeek's Push into Africa Reveals China's AI Power Grab

"power grab"

DeepSeek is famously open source, and extremely price competitive, increasing accessible to AI to the many of the regions of the planet which cannot afford Wester prices. What power is being grabbed here? It seems that no China story can be complete without nefarious intent being implied

> For African startups like EqualyzAI, DeepSeek is “orders of magnitude” cheaper than competitors, Adekanmbi said. DeepSeek Chat, for instance, charges 27 cents to process one million tokens of query sent and $1.10 for every million tokens it generates in response. OpenAI’s GPT-4o charges $5 to process the same amount of tokens of query sent and $15 to produce the same amount of tokens in response. If EqualyzAI used GPT-4o, the startup would pay about $12,500 a month to train a small-language model for an e-learning platform, as opposed to the roughly $2,700 per month it now pays DeepSeek for the same task.