Chinese artificial intelligence phenomenon DeepSeek revealed some financial numbers on Saturday, saying its “theoretical” profit margin could be more than five times costs, peeling back a layer of the secrecy that shrouds business models in the AI industry.

DeepSeek momentarily surpassed OpenAI’s ChatGPT at the top of Apple’s App Store rankings, though it has since dropped off the general rankings and currently stands at sixth place in the productivity category,

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek recently declared that its AI models could be very profitable — with some asterisks. In a post on X, DeepSeek boasted that its