American AI companies have shown they are money and compute eaters, and massively so at that. Billions later, and well, not much to show.
But Deepseek cost $5M to develop, and made multiple novel ways to train.
Oh, and their models and code are all FLOSS. The US companies are closed. Basically, the US ai companies are too busy treating each other as vultures.
This is highly contested, and was either a big misunderstanding by everyone reporting it, or maliciously placed there (by a quant company, right before the stock fell a lot for nvda and the rest) depending on who you ask.
If we're being generous and assume no malicious intent (big if), anyone who has trained a big model can tell you that the cost of 1 run is useless in the big scheme of things. There is a lot of cost in getting there, in the failed runs, in the subsequent runs, and so on. The fact that R2 isn't there after ~6 months should say a lot. Sometimes you get a great training run, but no-one is looking at the failed ones and adding up that cost...
Most importantly those who mention that the game was made by 30 people do it to compare it with other much larger teams with hundreds if not thousands of people and those teams use contractors too!