BEIJING, April 24 -- Chinese startup DeepSeek released a new artificial intelligence model with "drastically reduced" costs today, more than a year after it stunned the world with a low-cost reasoning model that matched the capabilities of US rivals.

The AI race has intensified the rivalry between China and the United States, and the White House yesterday accused Chinese entities of a massive effort to steal artificial intelligence technology.

Hangzhou-based DeepSeek burst onto the scene in January last year with a generative AI chatbot, powered by its R1 reasoning model, that upended assumptions of US dominance in the strategic sector.

The new version, DeepSeek-V4, "features an ultra-long context of one million words", the company sai...