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.
any claim from the deepseek folks should be considered with wide margins of error.
I know we distrust them on account of being nefarious Chinese, but has anything come to light with R1 or the people behind it specifically to justify this?
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).