Chinese artificial intelligence companies are driving down costs to create competitive models, as they contend with US chip restrictions and smaller budgets than their Western counterparts.
针对美国芯片限制和预算比不上西方同行的现实，中国人工智能(AI)企业正在压低成本以创建具有竞争力的模型。
Start-ups such as 01.ai and DeepSeek have reduced prices by adopting strategies such as focusing on smaller data sets to train AI models and hiring cheap but skilled computer engineers.
零一万物(01.ai)和深度求索(DeepSeek)等初创企业借助各种策略——比如在训练AI模型时专注于较小的数据集，并且聘请低薪但熟练的计算机工程师——来降低价格。
Bigger technology groups such as Alibaba, Baidu and ByteDance have also engaged in a pricing war to cut “inference” costs, the price of calling upon large language models to generate a response, by more than 90 per cent and to a fraction of that offered by US counterparts.
阿里巴巴(Alibaba)、百度(Baidu)和字节跳动(ByteDance)等大型科技集团也参与了价格战，将“推理”成本（调用大型语言模型生成响应的价格）降低逾90%，仅为美国同行的一小部分。
This is despite Chinese companies having to navigate Washington’s ban on exports of the highest-end Nvidia AI chips, seen as crucial to developing the most cutting edge models in the US.
出现这一局面的背景是，中国企业不得不应对华盛顿方面对英伟达(Nvidia)最高端AI芯片的出口禁令，这些芯片在美国被视为开发最前沿模型的关键。