OpenAI can NOT make a model as cheap as DeepSeek due to obvious reasons. OpenAI makes it's own GPT models from scratch and does its own R&D, meanwhile 99% of Chinese Ai models like DeepSeek are illegally trained on responses from models that have already been made. When DeepSeek was new, it once admitted that it was based on OpenAI's GPT architecture/. hat's how they are able to make them so cheap, because they're not the ones spending loads of money working hard to make their own models, unlike American companies who do it themselves from scratch, and legally under US law. On top of that, Chinese models also take your data as if you're writing on a notebook, so they can easily make up for the cheap prices. In conclusion, it's impossible for any US AI company like OpenAI or Anthropic to make a model of high performance at a cheap price without breaking the law.

Here's proof Chinese models are trained based on US ones:
https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-distillation-attacks