it's not likely as DeepSeek wasn't among China's major AI players before the R1 release, having maintained a relatively low profile. In fact, both DeepSeek-V2

it's not likely as DeepSeek wasn't among China's major AI players before the R1 release, having maintained a relatively low profile. In fact, both DeepSeek-V2 and V3 had outperformed many competitors, I've seen some posts about that. However, these achievements received limited mainstream attention prior to their breakthrough release.