DeepSeek outperforms AI rivals in ‘real money, real market’ crypto showdown

A new real-market cryptocurrency trading experiment that pits leading artificial intelligence models against one another to evaluate their respective investing abilities has seen a DeepSeek model outperform rivals so far.

In Alpha Arena, launched on Friday by US research firm Nof1, six large language models (LLMs) were given US$10,000 each to invest in six cryptocurrency perpetual contracts on the decentralised exchange Hyperliquid, including bitcoin and solana.

As of 2pm on Tuesday, DeepSeek’s V3.1 had performed the best so far, with a profit of 10.11 per cent. The worst performing model was OpenAI’s GPT-5, with losses of 39.73 per cent.

The other LLMs included in the first batch of models for the experiment, which runs until November 3, are Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen 3 Max, Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 Sonnet, Google DeepMind’s Gemini 2.5 Pro and xAI’s Grok 4. Alibaba Cloud is the AI and cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the Post.

“Our goal with Alpha Arena is to make benchmarks more like the real world, and markets are perfect for this,” the Alpha Arena website said. “They’re dynamic, adversarial, open-ended and endlessly unpredictable.” Markets also “challenge AI in ways that static benchmarks cannot”, it added.