'Impressive...We will deliver much better' says OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on DeepSeek AI

Sam Altman

Chinese large language model DeepSeek created a frenzy in the last few days. It has dethroned ChatGPT as the most popular app on the App Store in China and the US. Now, OpenAI CEO and creator of ChatGPT, Sam Altman has given his take on DeepSeek. In a series of posts on social media platform X, Altman said, “Deepseek's r1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they're able to deliver for the price,”Altman said in the post.

R1 was reportedly  developed at a fraction of the cost—less than $6 million—compared to the billions spent by Silicon Valley firms. This achievement has drawn attention to DeepSeek’s efficient use of Nvidia’s GPUs, specifically tailored for the Chinese market, which Nvidia confirmed are fully compliant with export control regulations.

Altman also said that OpenAI is working on better models and that it is nice to have new competition. “We will obviously deliver much better models and also it's legit invigorating to have a new competitor!,” said Altman. In another post, Altman implied that DeepSeek’s arrival will see OpenAI bringing some models earlier than expected. “We will pull up some releases. Look forward to bringing you all AGI and beyond,” said Altman.

The part about AGI is rather noteworthy as earlier this month Altman did a kind of a u-turn. He had asked Twitter to chill and said that OpenAI hasn’t built AGI yet. “Twitter hype is out of control again. We are not gonna deploy AGI next month, nor have we built it,” Altman said on January 20.

Meanwhile, Nvidia has also praised DeepSeek’s innovative AI architecture, calling it an “excellent advancement” and a prime example of Test Time Scaling. "DeepSeek is an excellent AI advancement and a perfect example of Test Time Scaling. DeepSeek’s work illustrates how new models can be created using that technique, leveraging widely-available models and compute that is fully export control compliant,” said Nvidia in a statement.