OpenAI’s chief research officer thinks response to DeepSeek has been ‘overblown’, here’s why

OpenAI

DeepSeek, a low-cost Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) model, has taken the tech world by storm by introducing the open-source AI model, DeepSeek R1, and has a shockingly low cost of operations. Moreover, it has managed to replicate ChatGPT and is currently 20 to 50 times more affordable to use than OpenAI's o1 model, depending on the task at hand.

Now, OpenAI Chief Research Officer Mark Chen has weighed in on the growing chatter surrounding DeepSeek. He also praised DeepSeek and added that it managed to independently find some of the core ideas OpenAI had used to build its o1 reasoning model, a few years ago.

Mark Chen feels the overwhelming response to DeepSeek is a bit ‘overblown’

But Chen added that the reaction to DeepSeek, which has wiped out $650 billion from NVIDIA’s market cap in a day, is a bit overstretched. Chen on social media platform X through multiple posts added: “However, I think the external response has been somewhat overblown, especially in narratives around cost. One implication of having two paradigms (pre-training and reasoning) is that we can optimize for a capability over two axes instead of one, which leads to lower costs.”

Further, Chen stated, “We will continue to improve our ability to serve models at lower cost, but we remain optimistic in our research roadmap, and will remain focused in executing on it. We’re excited to ship better models to you this quarter and over the year!” Mark Chen isn’t the only OpenAI executive to acknowledge DeepSeek’s results. Earlier this week, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman called DeepSeek’s model “impressive,” and said it was “invigorating” to have a competitor, which is appreciated by most users.