OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responds to DeepSeek AI hype amid widespread stock value crash

The DeepSeek R1 model has caused a massive stir in the tech community as the AI model that allegedly is on par with OpenAI's o3 model but cost just $6 million to create on old NVIDIA GPUs has cast shades of doubt over the billions of dollars invested into AI development across the United States.

The market has reacted to the unveiling of DeepSeek's R1 model, with approximately $1 trillion being wiped away, and NVIDIA seeing its biggest loss in the company's history with a $600 billion wipeout on Monday. Now, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has responded to the new R1 model in a series of X posts, writing he believes the new R1 model is "impressive," especially considering what the company was able to achieve given the price tag it paid. Moreover, Altman said that OpenAI will "obviously deliver much better models," but it's also "invigorating to have a new competitor" on the market.

Altman continued in a follow-up post, saying he and the company are excited to continue executing "our research roadmap," and added, "more computing is more important now than ever before to succeed at our mission." The latter is likely in reference to additional computation power needed to train sophisticated AI models. This computational power comes in the form of NVIDIA GPUs, and the problem AI companies are now facing is that DeepSeek achieved an AI model close to the level of OpenAI's latest model with just 3% to 5% of the resources.

This breakthrough in AI model was achieved on older NVIDIA H100 GPUs and not the chipmaker's latest GPUs. Moreover, the R1 model has been open-sourced, allowing developers to see what's under the hood.