[Gerardo1]

There's no way to know who's funding it (but being at least state subsidized is highly likely), and you we don't really know how much it cost (but in any case it's still less than OpenAI is spending).

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).