As China’s home-grown AI development firm DeepSeek shakes up the global tech and investment landscape, domestic discussion has begun to focus on what has given the cheaper-version language model its surprise edge over global competitors like ChatGPT.

The artificial intelligence startup has earned praise for its strong performance, affordability and open-source architecture, but there is a growing sense in online communities that much of its success is due to its incorporation of Chinese characters during its pre-training phase.