"the media sucks at factchecking DeepSeek's claims" is... an interesting attempt at refuting the idea that DeepSeek's claims aren't entirely factual.

That's the opposite of what I'm saying. Deepseek is the one under scrutiny, yet they are the only one to publish source code and training procedures of their model. So far the only argument against them is "if I read the first half of a sentence in deepseeks whitepaper and pretend the other half of the sentence doesn't exist, I can generate a newsworthy headline". So much so that you just attempted to present a completely absurd and unverifiable number from a guy with a financial incentive to exaggerate, and a non apples-to-apples comparison made by WSJ as airtight evidence against them. OpenAI allegedly has enough hardware to invalidate deepseeks training claims in roughly five hours - given the massive financial incentive to do so, if deepseek was being untrustworthy, you don't think they would have done so by now?

if you mean to argue that DeepSeek wasn't being underhanded at all and just very innocently presented their figures without proper context (that just so happened to spurn a media frenzy in their favor)... then i have a bridge to sell you.

What do you mean proper context? I posted their full quote above, they presented their costs with full and complete context, such that the number couldn't be misconstrued without one being willfully ignorant.

OpenAI is very demonstrably pissing away at least that much money every time they add one to the number at the end of their slop generator

It sounds to me like you have a very clear bias, and you don't care at all about whether or not what they said is actually true or not, as long as the headlines about AI are negative