OpenAI CEO calls DeepSeek R1 'impressive' and says it's 'invigorating to have a new competitor'

DeepSeek AI is making headlines because the Chinese startup has developed cutting-edge and cost-effective large-language models using fewer GPUs than systems costing billions from companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Google. With the company's flagship R1 model performing on par with OpenAI's o1, this has spilled over to the financial markets, where NVIDIA's stock dipped to the point where it saw the biggest single-day drop in US history.

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Despite its market cap dropping by several hundreds of billions, NVIDIA recently released a statement praising DeepSeek as "an excellent AI advancement and a perfect example of Test Time Scaling." DeepSeek's efforts are being widely praised because it didn't require billions of dollars of AI hardware to train.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman released a short statement earlier today on social media on DeepSeek R1, praising it as an "impressive model" while teasing "much better models" coming soon from the company. He also said that OpenAI will bring a few releases forward in response to DeepSeek's surprising and immediate success.

While also teasing AGI.

"DeepSeek's R1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they're able to deliver for the price," Sam Altman wrote on X. "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," Sam Altman adds, hinting that OpenAI won't be scaling back its use of countless GPUs for its training anytime soon. "The world is going to want to use a lot of AI and really be quite amazed by the next-gen models coming. We look forward to bringing you all AGI and beyond."

• Read more: NVIDIA statement on DeepSeek: says Chinese AI company is an 'excellent AI advancement'
• Read more: NVIDIA shares bleed $384 billion in value in a few hours after China's DeepSeek shocks AI world
• Read more: DeepSeek's new AI assistant app is the top free app on the Apple App Store, ahead of ChatGPT
• Read more: Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has 50,000 NVIDIA H100 AI GPUs says CEO, even with US restrictions