The floodgates have opened for building AI reasoning models on the cheap. Researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington have developed a model that performs comparably to OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek R1 models in math and coding — for less than $50 of cloud compute credits.

AI researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington were able to train an AI "reasoning" model for under $50 in cloud compute credits, according

Explore the key differences between OpenAI's o3-mini and o1-mini models. Learn which AI model suits your needs for speed, cost, and precision

Researchers from Stanford and Washington developed an AI model for $50, rivaling top models like OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek.

It's cheap to copy already built models from their outputs, but likely still expensive to train new models that push the boundaries.