OpenAI founder Sam Altman, credited with the success of ChatGPT, has reacted to Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s rapid rise in the AI world and stated that it is invigorating to have a new competitor. Altman has also hinted at potential new releases by OpenAI to counter DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model.
In subsequent posts on X, Altan wrote, “deepseek’s r1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they’re able to deliver for the price. we will obviously deliver much better models and also it’s legit invigorating to have a new competitor! we will pull up some releases.”
“but mostly we are excited to continue to execute on our research roadmap and believe more compute is more important now than ever before to succeed at our mission. the world is going to want to use a LOT of ai, and really be quite amazed by the next gen models coming.” the OpenAI CEO added.
Why DeepSeek has got US companies worried?
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI startup founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, who is also the head of the Chinese quant hedge fund High-Flyer. The company shot to fame last month after various benchmarks showed that its V3 large language model (LLM) outperformed those of many popular US tech giants, while being developed at a much lower cost.
DeepSeek’s LLMs are built at much lower costs and processing power than its Western rivals, challenging the prevailing belief that running AI models requires ever-increasing amounts of computing power. In a paper last month, DeepSeek researchers said the V3 model used older Nvidia H800 chips for training and cost around 5.6million – a paltry sum compared to the billions that AI giants like Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI have committed to spend this year alone.
DeepSeek’s low-cost models are likely to threaten the market share of existing AI companies such as OpenAI, Meta and others, while forcing incumbents to lower the price of their offerings in order to remain competitive.